by Jean Strouse
He rarely spent more than a few days at any of his rural preserves, and often did return to the city on short notice. Sometimes professional crises called him back, but usually it was his own restlessness that kept him in constant motion. He found little pleasure in nature or bucolic life; only on ocean liners and at European spas did he fully relax. As soon as he finished setting up and fitting out each new country “barony,” from Cragston to Camp Uncas, he tended to lose interest and move on.
He embarked on an unusual venture in the fall of 1896 when the publishing house of Harper & Brothers asked for his financial help. Harper’s was one of the oldest publishers in the United States, including among its authors Dickens, Macauley, the Brontës, Thackeray, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thoreau, Melville, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. In addition to its trade book division, the company owned the illustrated family newspaper Harper’s Weekly, a children’s journal called Harper’s Round Table, the weekly fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazar [sic], and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which serialized many of its novels. It also published textbooks.
Cultural distinction had not translated into profit, and Harper’s was nearly bankrupt when one of its directors, William Mackay Laffan, asked Morgan to engineer a rescue. Laffan was an Irish-born journalist and arts connoisseur, formerly an editor with Harper’s, now publisher of the New York Sun and one of Morgan’s advisers on art. (He had published a book about Engravings on Wood in 1887 and would bring out another on Oriental Ceramic Art in 1897.) J. P. Morgan & Co. reorganized the seventy-nine-year-old Harper’s partnership as a corporation in November 1896, issuing $2 million of stock and $3 million in bonds. The Harper family bought most of the stock, and Laffan earned a $100,000 commission. Over the next three years the house of Morgan lent the house of Harper $850,000.
Morgan did not impose new management on Harper’s the way he did on bankrupt railroads, and in 1899 the publishers again faced default. The book division was earning no profit, the English office had closed (Clarence McIlvaine, Juliet’s rejected suitor, stayed on as Harper’s London representative, hiring a young associate named Jonathan Cape), and the magazine was losing advertising and circulation. A rival monthly called McClure’s, which cost 15¢ to Harper’s 35¢, had drawn authors away with the prospect of wider distribution through its affiliated newspaper syndicate. Samuel S. McClure was publishing Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Stephen Crane, William Allen White, Ray Stannard Baker, Frank Norris, O. Henry, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London; he was also publishing books in partnership with Frank Doubleday.
McClure was to the Harpers what Charles Coffin was to Thomas Edison—an astute manager who had figured out how to run the business more effectively than his rivals—and at Laffan’s suggestion, Morgan invited McClure to take over the ailing house of Harper at a bargain price: two thirds of the $2 million in stock for roughly half its nominal value, or $692,000, payable over ten years. McClure wired an associate: “I have got the earth with several things thrown in, and am eager to see if you don’t want one or two kingdoms for yourself.” He could not raise money for the purchase, however, partly because of Harper’s large debt.
Morgan offered to increase his loan in the fall of 1899, but the Harper directors decided to put the company into receivership. They hired George M. Harvey, a former managing editor of Pulitzer’s World, to reorganize and run it. Morgan approved, telling the board that “the downfall of the House of Harper would be a national calamity.” When William Dean Howells learned of the Harper default, he said, “It was as if I had read that the government of the United States had failed.” In the early years of the twentieth century, people said the Weekly had become more Harvey’s than Harper’s.*
Morgan never asked the publisher to repay his loan, and advanced additional sums over the next several years for a total of almost $2.5 million, much of which was still on the books at the time of his death. He did not expect profit or editorial influence—he really thought “the downfall of the House of Harper would be a national calamity.” Nonetheless, Harvey knew exactly how indebted he was to the banker, whose picture hung on his office wall. It was Harvey who reissued the novel Fraternity: on the flyleaf of the first copy off the press, he wrote, “Republished for Mr. Morgan with the compliments of George Harvey. October 6, 1910.”†
As Morgan entered his seventh decade, several of his contemporaries died. His sister Sarah suffered sudden heart failure at Bad Nauheim, Germany, in July of 1896. And in November 1897 Walter Burns collapsed in London and died.
Pierpont had been closer to Mary’s husband than to any other colleague except Junius or Tony Drexel, and had trusted him with the management of the London firm. Now, he would assume responsibility for his sister’s family—she had two children, Mary Ethel, called May, and Walter Spencer Morgan Burns—and have to make new arrangements for J. S. Morgan & Co.
As a first step, he sent Jack to England at the beginning of 1898 to represent the family and learn the professional ropes. Crossing the Atlantic on the RMS Teutonic with his wife and three young children, Jack reported to Fanny: “Everyone treats us as if the Morgan family owned the earth which makes it very pleasant for us.”
His father had preceded them to England, and “laid himself out to make us comfortable,” continued Jack. The junior Morgans stayed at Princes Gate and Dover House until they found a house of their own at No. 2 South Street in Mayfair, between Florence Nightingale and Earl Grey. Pierpont remained in England for several weeks to settle the Burns estate, take charge of affairs at J. S. Morgan & Co, and introduce his son to City bankers, the Lord Chief Justice, the Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury), Joseph Chamberlain (head of the Colonial Office), and the political journalist James Bryce. Both Jack and Walter S. M. Burns were made partners in J. S. Morgan & Co. on January 1, 1898.
Most evenings in London after dinner, Jack told Fanny, Pierpont and his sister challenged the next generation at dominoes: “Father & Aunt M. winning amid triumphant cheers—from themselves,” and two weeks later, “It is too funny to see Father & Aunt Mary gravely sitting down to play that imbecile game.” Though the elder Morgan complained of a head cold, giddiness, and liver trouble, he struck Jack as “more cheerful and contented than I’ve seen him for a long time,” especially after “the biggest medical man around” pronounced him eligible for life insurance.
If Morgan privately made fun of his daughter-in-law’s “cold roast Boston” propriety, he appreciated her attractive appearance and social skills. Neither he nor Junius had had a wife who was an asset in London society, and he showed himself (to Jack’s surprise) as “immensely interested in Jessie’s social career!” When Morgan the elder arranged to have Jessie presented to the Queen, Jack reported to his mother in mock complaint that “Louisa’s friend Victoria R. won’t receive any young married women whose husbands haven’t been to a [royal] Levee so I am booked for Feb. 21, with court dress & all, sword and cocked hat too, I believe, to go and see my friend Albert Ed. Prince of Wales. It will make me feel like seven kinds of jackass but Jessie must go to court at all hazards, & at any cost. Sad isn’t it.”
Earlier in the century, presentation at court had been restricted to the titled and landed British aristocracy, but by the 1890s Victoria Regina had opened her receptions to women from wealthy families in Britain, the empire, and the United States. Jack’s formal introduction to the Prince of Wales went off without a hitch, and Jessie was presented to the Queen in the Buckingham Palace throne room three days later. Others attending the event included the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough (formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York), Lord and Lady Churchill (the former Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn), the Dukes of Richmond, Norfolk, and Devonshire, Lady Spencer, and Lady Cadogan. The Queen wore black robes and brilliant jewels.
London’s Daily Mail the next day confused the senior and junior Morgans in concluding that “Quite the most beautiful dress in the whole room was the one worn by Mrs. Pierpont Morgan, whose husband is one of th
e big American financiers, and who is herself a pretty woman—tall, slender, with fair hair and blue eyes, and a very charming smile.” The striking feature of her dress, made of muslin and lace over a white satin slip, was a satin train falling from the shoulder, lined with pale blue miroire velvet and edged with pink roses.
The younger Morgans were, as the elder intended, taken up by London society, and they became ardent Anglophiles. Pierpont accepted his association with British aristocrats as a matter of course. Jack, always less sure of himself, gave it a snobbish turn. After he and Jessie had tea one day at Windsor Castle with Lady Antrim, who was “in waiting” to the Queen, he told Fanny: “Jessie and I feel much more at home with the swells who are real swells, not wildly gay ones but the very best, than with almost anyone.”
After seeing Jessie out in royal London, Pierpont went off to Monte Carlo and Rome—probably with Adelaide—but rumors that the United States might go to war with Spain cut his trip short. Ninety miles off the Florida coast, Cuban insurgents had been fighting Spain’s colonial misrule for years, and American sympathy for the rebels intensified in the late nineties when more than two hundred thousand Cubans died of hunger and disease. Humanitarians urging American intervention were joined by imperialists who wanted the United States to conquer new territories, open foreign markets, and test its military strength. The “yellow press” World and Journal heightened the country’s bellicose mood by playing up Spanish atrocities and Cuban anguish. Early in 1898, U.S. religious and political leaders joined the chorus calling for war with Spain.
The American business community opposed the impending conflict as likely to disrupt international trade and jeopardize the recent economic recovery. Cleveland in his second term had resisted congressional pressure to intervene in Cuba, and pro-business Senators Mark Hanna and Nelson W. Aldrich tried to help McKinley avert war in 1898. Jingoists ridiculed all opposition to the prospective fight as unpatriotic. Theodore Roosevelt, now Assistant Secretary of the Navy, announced that “this country needs a war” as he condemned the “flabby, timid type of character, which eats away the great fighting qualities of our race,” and accused the “money power” of being more interested in profit than in principle.
In mid-February, the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor (probably the result of an internal malfunction, not a Spanish torpedo) edged the overwrought nation closer to war. Morgan had planned to spend the winter in Rome. The news from the United States changed his mind. He stopped in London on the way home. Jack found him “so worried and bothered by the number of things on his mind and the annoyance of war rumors” that he was “not feeling very well & is rather down about himself but probably Markoe will be able to set that all right.”
As the senior Morgan sailed for New York at the end of March, the junior offered his own analysis of the political situation to his mother by mail: “Personally I do not like to see a civilized nation taking up the cause of the Cuban insurgents who are of so low a kind as to shoot a man under a flag of truce, as they did the other day. I am sorry for the poor starving wretches and should be glad to help by sending food, but they are not fit to govern themselves and we shall be responsible in the eyes of the world for such a state of things as now exists in Hayti, or worse. That is not a pleasant prospect.”
Pleasant prospect or not, McKinley was moving toward military intervention. In mid-April he blockaded the Cuban coast, and on the twenty-fifth Congress declared war. The Navy immediately requisitioned Corsair, rechristened her the USS Gloucester, and turned her into a gunboat. Jack, hearing rumors to that effect in London, asked Fanny whether or not they were true, “and if so, what is Father going to do for a summer home this year? Personally, I believe it would pay the Government to keep him in yachts and thereby in health; his services would be more valuable to them when well.”
The government paid Morgan $225,000 for his yacht, leaving him to build a new one on his own. The Gloucester, née Corsair, joined three other U.S. ships to blockade the Spanish admiral Cervera at Santiago Harbor on July 3, and in the course of a few hours the Americans destroyed his entire fleet.‡ On July 16, the Spanish command surrendered. The “splendid little war,” as John Hay called it, lasted about ten weeks—just long enough to fire the national imagination with half-fictional tales of manly heroics, including Teddy Roosevelt’s highly publicized Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill, and not long enough to bring on an extended political debate or sacrifice many American lives.
Morgan was not so concerned with the economic consequences of the war that he neglected another kind of crisis. Years later, when a friend asked about the provenance of a fine cigar, he said: “You remember the time of the breakout of the Spanish war, how the declaration hung in the balance for a long time? I knew that if we had war, that would be the last of the Havana cigars. I had somebody in Washington ready to cable me of the declaration of war. I received my cable before it was made public, got into a hansom and drove to every cigar store which I knew sold those cigars, paid cash and gathered the boxes into my hansom, for I did not dare to trust them to send them after war was declared, and after two or three trips in the hansom I had enough to last me until now.”
The Spanish-American War did less damage to the economy than Wall Street had feared, and the quick victory—bringing with it over the next few years acquisitions in Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Wake, and Hawaii—reinforced the imperialists’ determination to compete for foreign “spheres of influence” with the other great powers in the West. Even before the treaty with Spain was ratified by the Senate, leading opponents of America’s global reach formed an Anti-Imperialist League; among them were Grover Cleveland, Charles Francis Adams, George Boutwell, John Sherman, Andrew Carnegie, Charles W. Eliot, William Dean Howells, William James, and Mark Twain.
Morgan probably sided with the Anti-Imperialists. He had told a friend in the early eighties of his “strong opposition to government giving any aid to … any enterprise outside the U.S.” with regard to the Panama Canal, and responded with caution as the country began in the nineties to seek greater access to foreign markets. He underwrote government bond issues in Argentina, Mexico, China, and Japan, but did not begin to lend to foreign states or to finance remote railroads on a large scale until he had men he trusted in Latin America and the Far East.§ A decade went by before he warily cooperated with politicians eager to establish “dollar diplomacy” abroad.
Less than a month after the second Corsair was converted into a gunboat, Morgan commissioned her engineer, J. Beavor-Webb, to design a third. The new yacht, built by T. S. Marvel at Newburgh, New York, and completed in December 1898, measured 304 feet, 63 feet more than her predecessor. She was also stronger and faster, but had the same gleaming black hull, gilt clipper bow, elegantly curved sheer, raked stack—and carpet pattern: since the mill that had made the 1890 rugs had gone out of business, Morgan ordered new ones custom-made.
As well equipped as a Gilded Age town house, the third Corsair also had polished maple panels lining her engine room, a library the width of the hull, a player piano, lace curtains in every stateroom, capes, cloaks, parasols, perfume vials, and powder puffs for female guests, silver-backed hairbrushes, cut-glass inkstands, leather portfolios filled with “Corsair” stationery, cases of vintage wine and brandy, fifty pounds of “Morgan” tea (a blend of Earl Grey and Lap-sang Souchong), and humidors filled with Cuban cigars. In the linen closet were 68 blankets, 116 sheets, 177 pillow cases, and 670 towels. The kitchen pantry accommodated several sets of “Corsair” china, silver baskets for almonds, candy, and fruit, fish forks and oyster forks, menu holders, champagne glasses, pearl-handled fruit knives, nut picks, sugar sifters, flower vases, marrow scoops, cocktail shakers (one marked “JPM”), julep strainers, grape shears, gold spoons, asparagus tongs, 84 linen tablecloths, 800 napkins, and 47 finger bowls. One spoon-and-fork set bore the name of Admiral Cervera, the Spaniard whose fleet had been demolished at Santiago Harbor with the help of the
USS Gloucester. On dozens of coffee cups, saucers, and spoons were the initials “A.D.,” for Adelaide Douglas.
Morgan’s third yacht could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, and he often sent her and the crew ahead while he sailed to Europe on White Star liners. He took friends cruising in the Mediterranean or along the Italian coast, and joined Europe’s crowned heads for sailing races at Cowes and Kiel. At the ends of these trips, Corsair preceded him home, then steamed out to pick him up in New York Harbor.‖
While Morgan was introducing his son and daughter-in-law to London in February 1898, Edith Sybil Randolph Whitney suffered a gruesome accident at her husband’s estate in Aiken, South Carolina. Riding a tall horse under a covered bridge one day, she failed to duck low enough, smashed her head into the overhang, and fell to the ground bleeding and unconscious.
When she woke up three days later she was in a cast from head to hip, with a broken cervical vertebra and both arms paralyzed. She and Whitney and their daughters, Adelaide Randolph and Dorothy Whitney, stayed in South Carolina for two months, then took a private train to New York. There, confined to her bed and in constant pain, Edith read, dictated letters, and saw close friends such as the Markoes, Adelaide Douglas, and Morgan. In the early summer, Whitney moved her to his property at Westbury, Long Island. Edith refused to give up. She asked Whitney to keep his box at the opera so she could use it as soon as she could walk. A friend wrote in his journal: “This is the cruelest thing I ever knew. Nature made this incomparable woman and then ruthlessly destroyed her.”