Morgan
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Morgan had been looking for someone to replace Walter Burns as senior resident in London for over a year. Dawkins was forty, just eight years older than Jack, and had no experience in banking. He did have wit, intelligence, and excellent political connections—and Morgan now wanted an Englishman to head his London office. Louisa, not usually in on her father’s business secrets, confided to her diary in February that she expected “for many reasons” to see more of Dawkins in the future.
In July the British government released him from the India assignment. The London Times reported that though government officials wanted Dawkins in India, they “considered it still more important that he should meet the wishes of Mr. Morgan.” An Anglo-American banker in London told colleagues that Morgan had tried and failed to find a partner in the City, then fallen back on “a capable Treasury official, who has his work to learn”—an account that echoed Pierpont’s complaint to Junius from Wall Street twenty-five years earlier about how difficult it was to find men of character, ability, and brains, just before he hired Fabbri.
On March 31, 1900, Dawkins started work at J. S. Morgan & Co. He would have 25 percent of the firm’s annual profits and losses, Pierpont 50 percent; Jack and Walter S. M. Burns would split the last 25 percent. No one had much confidence in Burns: Dawkins found him “capable” but “young, fat, and lazy.”
After seven months as a banker, Dawkins described himself as “happy enough in the City, but there is not enough to do.” Eventually he found enough to do, but never relinquished his primary allegiances to Milner, politics, and the British Empire. He hoped to finance his own and Milner’s political careers with his banker’s earnings, which a City journal estimated at £25,000 ($125,000) a year. Meanwhile he chaired a War Office Reorganization Committee, which took him away from Old Broad Street for long stretches of time and eventually earned him a knighthood. He told Milner that his American partners had been “more patriotic than Englishmen in facilitating the War Office inquiry,” and added a few weeks later—reflecting the Morgan bank’s sense of itself as peer to states—that the firm had let him take on the political work “since the Government acted well in releasing me from India so promptly.”
Morgan hired another Englishman as well in the spring of 1900. He wanted someone to take charge of daily operations at the London office, and this time he chose a man with a background in banking. Edward Charles Grenfell had read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and worked with two financial firms before joining Morgan’s at the age of thirty. He was the son of Henry Riversdale Grenfell, the MP and director of the Bank of England whom Pierpont and Fanny had visited in Kent in 1876, when “Teddy” was six. At the end of 1900 a Barings partner reported that Morgan intended, “without regard to expenditure of money, to make the position of [his English] firm unrivalled for the next generation.”
When Morgan gave May Burns pearls for her wedding in 1899, he presented Louisa with a strand as well, saying (she reported) “ ‘he meant to give it me when I married and as I didn’t seem to get married it didn’t seem worth while to wait!’ ” Louisa was thirty-two at the time, and though she longed to “meet some of the young men” at the parties she attended with her father, rarely did. Then, in 1900, a man she had known for some time proposed. He was Herbert Livingston Satterlee, a graduate of Columbia College and Law School, and a partner in the New York law firm of Ward, Hayden & Satterlee. He asked her to marry him just before she sailed for Europe with her father at the end of March. The offer took her by surprise—she thought he was interested in her sister Anne—but she promised to consider it carefully and reply from London by cable. Crossing the Atlantic, she wailed to Fanny, “Why why did ‘he’ ask me that question just before I left? I can’t keep him waiting … but it is hard to settle it all from so far away.”
With some trepidation she discussed the situation with her father. “He knew of no reason he could have against it,” she reported to her mother. “He only wants me to wait and think whether I am sure that it is ‘essential to my happiness.’ As I have lived very happily without it for years it seems difficult to realize that it is essential now!… Only I am perfectly sure that I can’t give it all up.” She did not give it up, and cabled her answer to Mr. Satterlee early in April. “I am really really happy,” she told Fanny, “a little shaky and breathless when I remember what it means!”
Her fiancé was also worried about what it meant—especially about how she would like living on $10,000 a year, “not as J. P. Morgan’s daughter but as Herbert Satterlee’s wife.” He could not, he warned her, afford “the kind of house in the kind of neighborhood you ought to have.”
Morgan asked the couple not to announce their engagement at first, for reasons he did not explain, but in May he took Louisa to Worth’s to order a wedding dress and trousseau—Satterlee wondered from New York, “Don’t you fear that Mr. Worth will let out the secret?” The prospective father of the bride completely commandeered the plans. Satterlee wanted a summer wedding; Morgan chose November. Satterlee liked the idea of a small ceremony; Morgan insisted on hundreds of guests. In New York one night in July, the two men stayed up late discussing details. Herbert reported to Louisa: “It was like a game of cards—I gave him the first trick, expecting that he would let me take the second—but he played the hand out, at least, he is still holding on to his cards! However, he was in a perfectly good humor about it and is quite satisfied with the way that he came out of the argument.”
Satterlee soon took the measure of his future father-in-law’s tyrannical generosity and formidable negotiating skills: “He is almost impossible to argue with, because he puts things in a way that make it seem a favor to him, as it were, and states not what might, could, would or should be done, but what he will do!” What he would do was give Louisa a house and $10,000 a year, matching Satterlee’s annual income. “I tried to head him off,” Satterlee protested, “but it was no use! He … gave me no opportunity or excuse for doing so.” Even silken shackles required getting used to: “if he had been anyone else or had put the matter differently, I suppose I would have shown what would have been foolish pride and unreasonable rebelliousness because I am so accustomed to having my way about my own plans that the Commodore is a new sensation for me.”
The Commodore entirely got his way about the wedding. He invited more than two thousand people to the service at St. George’s Church on the afternoon of November 15, 1900. Dr. Rainsford and the bridegroom’s cousin, Bishop Henry Yates Satterlee of Washington, performed the ceremony. The florist Thorley draped garlands of red and white roses over the chancel rail, and banked the altar with roses, palms, and ferns.
Louisa came down the aisle on her father’s arm. She wore Worth’s gown of heavy white peau de soie under point d’Alençon lace, and carried a bouquet of white roses, orchids, and lilies of the valley. Diamond ornaments held her rosepoint veil in place and glittered in the folds of lace on her bouquet. After the ceremony the couple received guests in the drawing room at 219. Thorley had hung a curtain of pink roses tied back to one side at the entrance to the room. On the landings above the front hall stood arches of Bridesmaid roses, orchids, and asparagus fern; pink bougainvillea and clusters of white rose were woven into the banisters all the way to the third floor.
For dinner the wedding party filed through the house to a temporary 75- by 55-foot wing Pierpont had built off the conservatory for the occasion: Gobelin tapestries lined its dark red walls, and clusters of electric lights hung from a pleated white silk ceiling. Louis Sherry’s waiters served a buffet of oysters, lobsters, sweetbreads, Yorkshire pudding, quail, pheasant, Virginia ham, salmon, chicken breasts, pâté de foie gras en croûte, ramequins, ice cream, wedding cake, and champagne.
Among the six hundred guests invited to both the ceremony and the reception were the Robert Bacons, Alexander Barings, Joseph Choates, Grover Clevelands, Ogden Codman, Jr., the Clinton Dawkinses and Robert W. deForests, Chauncey Depew, Adelaide and William Proctor Douglas, the David Egleston
s, Egisto Fabbris, E. L. Godkins, several Goodwins, Secretary of State and Mrs. John Hay, James H. and J. Bruce Ismay (the owners of Britain’s White Star Line), the Charles Laniers and Lewis Cass Ledyards, the just reelected President and Mrs. William McKinley, Dr. and Mrs. James W. Markoe, Alice Mason, the Junius Morgans, Professor and Mrs. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the Reverend and Mrs. Endicott Peabody, the Right Reverend and Mrs. Henry Codman Potter, the Reverend and Mrs. William S. Rainsford, Miss Adelaide Randolph, the Whitelaw Reids, the William Rockefellers, the new Vice President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, the Secretary of War and Mrs. Elihu Root, the Francis Lynde Stetsons, Fred Stevens, the James Stillmans, Waldo Storys, Louis Comfort Tiffanys, several Vanderbilts, the W. Seward Webbs, and William C. Whitney.d
In giving his favorite daughter away to be married, Morgan had no intention of letting her go far. He presented the newlyweds with a house near Cragston at Highland Falls, and eventually built them another next to his own in town. Satterlee adapted to his father-in-law’s peremptory ways, and came to share Louisa’s solicitude for his health and state of mind. Morgan saw Louisa constantly in New York, but needed a new partner for his travels. After 1900 he turned to his youngest daughter, Anne, and to Adelaide Douglas.
* His regime was as notable for its public relations campaigns as its literary successes. Harvey gave lavish publication parties at Delmonico’s and Sherry’s, courted the American Booksellers Association, and treated his staff to white-tie dinners. To keep Mark Twain at Harper’s he made a prescient if theatrical gesture in 1900, proposing to store the author’s memoirs in a bank until the year 2000, when they would be reissued “in whatever modes should then be prevalent, that is by printing as at present, or by use of phonographic cylinders, or by electrical methods, or by any other method which may then be in use.” He also offered to give a dinner at which he and Twain would publicly sign a contract and sell autographed copies for $50 each. Nothing came of these plans, but Harper’s secured exclusive rights to all of Twain’s work, guaranteeing the author $25,000 a year for five years; by 1914, it had paid him and his heirs over $300,000.
† After Morgan died, his partners replaced Harvey with managers who had a stronger allegiance to the Morgan bank than to literary quality, and major writers left the firm. The editors Cass Canfield and Eugene F. Saxton restored its reputation in the twenties, eventually bringing in J.B.S. Haldane, J. B. Priestley, James Thurber, E. B. White, Richard Wright, Glenway Wescott, and Julian and Aldous Huxley. In 1932 Saxton refused to accept his friend John Dos Passos’s radical montage of fiction and fact, 1919, unless the novelist revised his portrait of Morgan as the “boss croupier of Wall Street”—a “bullnecked irascible man with small black magpie’s eyes and a growth on his nose,” who used the country’s financial crises for personal gain. Dos Passos refused to alter his text. Harcourt, Brace published the book. Thirty years later Dos Passos had changed his politics and his mind. He told a biographer in 1965: “… looking back on it I realize now that the Morgan piece was a prejudiced piece of work. If I were to write the book over I would modify it. Actually, old man Morgan, before his death, worked hard to avert the coming war.”
‡ The Gloucester later defended the harbor of Guanica, Puerto Rico, firing off 3- and 6-pound cannons while a landing party went ashore to capture the town. After the war she made a victory sail to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and remained with the Navy through World War I. Sold to a commercial line in 1919, she was eventually wrecked in a hurricane off Pensacola, Florida.
§ His New York firm’s small offering of Mexican government bonds in 1899 was hailed as a major turning point in the history of American finance. London’s Daily Mail, praising this “first appearance” of an American banking house on a foreign loan prospectus, reported that New York was “flapping its wings over the new departure of Messrs J. P. Morgan & Company, who well deserve to be congratulated on their courage and enterprise.” In Argentina, Morgan’s London house became a leading provider of capital to both government and private enterprise after the 1890 Baring crisis—particularly to the Great Western Railway Company, which it restored to financial health. Japan, rapidly modernizing and hoping to decrease its financial dependence on London, approached J. P. Morgan & Co. in 1898 about issuing bonds for a government-chartered industrial bank. Morgan declined, since some of his London experts considered the issue risky and Japan would not put up the security he required. The Japanese regarded the good faith of their government as “equal to any in the world,” explained the head of the American Trading Company in Japan, and “it hurts their pride to be classed with the Chinese” by having to furnish collateral. In China, which was far less economically and industrially advanced than Japan, J. S. Morgan & Co. accepted shares in government loans sponsored by other bankers in the nineties. As the West began to fight over access to commercial opportunities in China—called the “slicing of the melon”—Morgan subscribed along with Jacob Schiff, James Stillman, and Levi P. Morton to the stock of an American China Development Company. Chartered in New Jersey in 1895, this corporation staked U.S. claim to railroad and mining concessions in China. Early in the new century Morgan became the largest shareholder in the ACDC, and played a quasi-diplomatic role in a struggle between the U.S. and Chinese governments over the Canton–Hankow railroad. (See Chapter 26.)
‖ On the inevitable question of what it cost, the third Corsair was valued for estate purposes after Morgan’s death in 1913 at $135,000, although the government had paid him $225,000 in 1898 for the second. In 1917 Jack turned Corsair (III) over to the Navy to fight in the Great War, and that May complained to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that the Naval Board had originally valued the yacht at $400,000 but the figure had just been reduced to $325,000 and he wanted to know why. A month later he told FDR it would cost him $850,000 to replace the hull alone. The Navy returned the yacht in 1919, and Jack sailed her until 1930, when he sold her to the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for a dollar, and commissioned a fourth, 343-foot Corsair from the Bath Iron Works in Maine. In 1942, the third Corsair—now the USS Oceanographer—was drafted for military service, and sailed with the Navy until 1944.
a Cellini’s virtuouso style and widely translated Autobiography had made him enormously popular with Americans, and it would not have taken an especially clever forger to engrave “BC MDXXIII” into the piece. The museum listed Morgan’s gift in its Annual Report for 1898 as a “sixteenth-century Italian altarpiece,” declared it a nineteenth-century forgery in 1933, and deaccessioned it in 1956.
b After Morgan died in 1913, the appraisers of his estate valued the Fragonard panels at $750,000. In 1915, Joseph Duveen bought them from Jack and sold them to Henry Clay Frick for $1.25 million. The Frick Collection also acquired Nicolaes Ruts, most of the sculpture and decorative arts objects from Morgan’s Fragonard room, the Marie Antoinette commode and secrétaire, the blue marble Gouthière side table, Constable’s White Horse, several more paintings, Renaissance bronzes, other choice tables, exquisite clocks, and a collection of Limoges enamels that is one of the finest in the United States.
c Pearls were in short supply and great demand at the turn of the century, before the development of cultivation techniques. In a dramatic example of changes in value over time, the heir to a railroad fortune sold his house at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street to the jeweler Cartier for $1.2 million in 1917; as payment, he accepted a two-strand Oriental pearl necklace valued at $1.2 million. According to the financial journalist John Steele Gordon, the Cartier building in the 1980s was worth over $20 million, while a similar strand of pearls would not bring more than $200,000.
d Those invited to the ceremony but not the reception included the Robert Brownings of Venice, Italy, the Andrew Carnegies, John J. Chapman, Edward S. Curtis, Richard Harding Davis, General Luigi P. di Cesnola, Harris Fahnestock, Mrs. James T. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, the E. H. Harrimans, Mrs. Christian Herter, the Richard Morris Hunts, Morris
K. Jesups, the Right Reverend and Mrs. William Lawrence, Columbia University president and Mrs. Seth Low, the Levi P. Mortons and Thomas Collier Platts, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Benjamin Strongs, J. Frederic Tams, Luther Terry, the Stanford Whites, and the Harry Payne Whitneys.
Chapter 20
THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN
With the economy booming, incomes rising, prices falling, a relatively painless recent military victory, eight thousand new “motorcars” driving around the country, and a proud sense of international stature, much of the United States was in an ebullient mood on the eve of the twentieth century. At the Republican National Convention in June of 1900, Senator Chauncey Depew, former president of the New York Central Railroad, declared, “There is not a man here that does not feel 400 per cent bigger in 1900 than he did in 1896, bigger intellectually, bigger hopefully, bigger patriotically, bigger in the breast from the fact that he is a citizen of a country that has become a world power for peace, for civilization, and for expansion of its industries and the products of its labor.”
Outside the Republican Convention hall, there were plenty of people who did not feel 400 percent bigger and more hopeful in 1900. Although the ferment over silver had died down, the impetus for social change and radical reform had not. Progressive activists and journalists were beginning to focus national attention on the widening gap between rich and poor, on the problems of cities, political corruption, the rights of women, the depletion of natural resources, continuing racial inequality, and the power of big business. The new Governor of Wisconsin, Republican reformer Robert M. La Follette, gained national prominence pledging to tax corporate property, regulate railroads, and manage public resources in the public interest.