by Jean Strouse
New York’s art dealers were mystified by the unfamilier Frenchman who was charming the likes of Fry, Ogden Codman, Morgan, and the “Bachelors.” Elsie tried several times to introduce her erudite expert to Henry Duveen, but de Beauvoir invariably failed to appear. Then one day she and Codman took him to see the Widener collection in Philadelphia, and by chance ran into Duveen there. De Beauvoir succumbed to a sudden coughing fit, holding his handkerchief over his face, but the dealer had recognized him. A few days of research confirmed the impression, and Duveen reported his findings to Morgan.
This paragon of knowledge and taste turned out to be an ingenious con man named Maurice Bosdari who had crossed Morgan’s path before. Calling himself a count, he had sold the banker several objets in August 1902 for £11,500 ($57,000), and Morgan had confirmed the purchase in writing—“a bronze statuette of Ganymede by Cellini, now at the South Kensington Museum, a French Commode Louis XV, and 40 English mezzotint portraits.” The bronze, needless to say, was not by Cellini, and the sale set in motion Bosdari’s larger plan: with Morgan’s signature in hand, he forged it on bills that he persuaded high-ranking British politicians, manufacturers, and financiers to discount, instructing them under no circumstances to show the bills to J. S. Morgan & Co., by express command of Morgan himself. When two of the bills, for £11,500 each, showed up at Old Broad Street early in 1903 and were recognized as fakes, Morgan’s partners found it “inconceivable that businessmen should have accepted such a story” and not informed them: “The bill brokers gave as the excuse for their silence that they were afraid of being told to mind their own business if they discussed JPM’s transactions with his firm.”
As soon as the fraud was detected Bosdari disappeared. The London police posted notices for his arrest, describing him as forty-five years old, five feet six inches, Italian by birth, fluent in French, German, English, and Spanish, respectable in appearance, and well known to the principal art dealers of London. When his clothes and personal effects were found on the deck of a steamer to Dieppe, people concluded that he had drowned. Officially dead, he secured money and a transatlantic ticket from a friend, went to Canada, entered a monastery, and two years later emerged as de Beauvoir in New York.
After the encounter with Duveen at Widener’s, Bosdari once again disappeared—this time to Italy, where he was arrested and briefly detained, then to France.‖ The picture of Morgan in Adelaide’s parlor listening to private lectures on art given by the imaginative huckster who had robbed official London in his name probably afforded Bosdari some retrospective diversion. Most likely it did not cause Morgan to lose any sleep.
Bessie Marbury took full credit for the education and emancipation of Anne. Morgan’s daughter had been “young for her age,” she wrote in a memoir, and not “allowed to grow up.” Using an image that would never have occurred to the Madison Avenue ladies, Bessie went on: “Her mind was ready for the spark plugs to be adjusted”—and there happened to be an able mechanic at hand. After their first visit to Versailles, Anne began “to draw her own conclusions, to develop her own opinions, to select her own interests, in other words to stand on her own feet.”
Miss Marbury noted strong similarities between Anne and her father. He was “a man of marvelous energy, of infinite courage, and of concentrated opinions. Once he believed in anyone or in any cause, no outside influence would have the slightest effect upon him”—and the same could be said of his daughter. Morgan held a position in the world that no woman could attain, however, and Bessie took a shrewd measure of his strengths: while they “drove him into leadership, as he grew older it was evident that he suffered from their very defects. To acknowledge defeat was foreign to his temperament. He was always loyal to his mistakes.”
Bessie may have exaggerated her role in Anne’s metamorphosis, but it was in the context of this amorous friendship that Morgan’s youngest daughter discovered strengths of her own, and ventured to defy him. He had begun moving the departure dates for his European trips back from spring to winter, and lengthening his stays from weeks to months. When he sailed in February 1906, Anne did not accompany him for the first time since Louisa’s marriage. She had decided no longer to travel with him and his mistress.
No one challenged him this way, and especially not on this subject. Though apparently furious, he was helpless to force compliance in a young woman whose will was as strong as his own. He remained abroad from February till July. Louisa, who had always accommodated herself to his schedule and demands, took her family to London in June (she had had a second baby girl), perhaps partly to offset her sister’s defection.
Anne followed with Fanny at the end of the month, meeting up with “E. and Elsie” in London the day she arrived. On June 30 she wrote in her diary: “Lunch Carlton E.… opera Faust Aunt M[ary]—strong talk!” And on July 1: “E. in a.m. Lunch and dinner Dover House. Long hot talk Herbert.” This strong, hot talk was probably about her defiance, but Anne did not change her mind. Not only was she no longer willing to serve as paternal helpmeet and chaperone; she now had a rich social world of her own.
On July 3, she went to France with Elsie and Bessie. She noted in her diary that “Father arrived” in Paris on the tenth. The next day “dined home with Father.” She did not say what they discussed. Then the “Triumvirate” moved to Versailles. On July 28, Marcel Proust came to the Villa Trianon for tea.
Morgan went on with his own summer—he dined at the Harcourts’ with Edward VII on July 14, gave his royal confrêre the tour of Princes Gate on the sixteenth, and two days later sailed back to New York.
Anne stayed in France until the end of September, and after 1906 moved into a life that had little except its energetic drive to do with her father’s. She made friends with Ida Tarbell and other members of the new investigative-journalist crowd, and visited Hull House, Jane Addams’s social-work settlement in Chicago. She opened a temperance restaurant for workers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, engaging Mrs. Andrew Carnegie and Mrs. Elbert Gary as waitresses. After watching the Wright brothers demonstrate their flying machine at Le Mans in August 1908, she went up in a plane with Elsie and Wilbur Wright. With Bessie and Daisy Harriman, she tried to interest the Senate in a woman who was developing industrial training programs for impoverished young people in Georgia. Discussing this project over lunch at the White House early in 1909, she told a Roosevelt aide: “there are such opportunities for [women’s] careers in America now that it makes one restless … With the money that we have back of us and the energy we have stored up in us one hardly knows where to begin.” She had begun.
In 1909 she joined a group of society women known as “the mink brigade” to support an International Ladies Garment Workers Union strike. Thirty thousand strikers, mostly teenage girls, walked off sweatshop jobs on New York’s Lower East Side and stayed out for thirteen weeks, forcing three hundred manufacturers to settle with the union. Anne met with the “shirt waist girls,” helped raise money for them, and attended meetings of the Women’s Trade Union League. She also raised money for the ILGWU after 146 women died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist sweatshop in Greenwich Village in 1911.
Dr. Rainsford reported to Louisa from France one spring on a confidential talk he had with Anne (clearly not confidential enough), and offered to exercise his influence over her in any way he could: “Surely the time will come when bitterly she will regret allowing anything any friend to separate her from her father. She should be now his constant companion—Oh life is so short! its opportunities so soon [gone]! and they come not again.”
In the fall of 1910, Belle Greene was returning from her Berensonian tour of Europe via the White Star’s Oceanic when she learned that Anne and Bessie were on board. Anne “got me aside for a long talk,” she reported to BB, and “asked me to use all of my influence to show ‘Father’ he was pursuing the wrong course with her. I lied quite boldly and calmly and said JP never discussed his family affairs with me. She seemed disappointed and a bit incredulous.” Anne repeated her
request the next day, “but I told her it was absolutely impossible for me to do.” The two women rarely crossed paths in New York, and Belle distrusted this “sudden amiability—besides I want to avoid meeting Miss Marbury if possible.… She may be mighty interesting but she certainly is horrid to look at. She has a strong resemblance to some of the portraits of Antinous.”
Belle succeeded in avoiding Anne’s horrid-looking friend in 1910, and referred disparagingly two years later to the “tiresome female house of Morgan Marbury & Co.” When she finally did meet Bessie, early in 1913, she fell (she told Berenson) “immediately in love.” The older woman’s “breeziness, frankness, and sincerity drew me irresistibly”—Belle was sorry they could never be friends, presumably because of the warfare over Anne. A month later she continued: “Your friend Miss Marbury seems really to like me, but I’m a gent’s lady!!! Tell me all she says about me.” Anne’s sister Juliet “hates Bessie Marbury,” and would do anything to “injure her and Elsie de Wolfe,” Belle informed BB: “You might tip them off if they don’t already know.” Juliet spoke of Bessie as if she were a “leper” from whom Anne had got a disease.
Juliet probably reflected the general family view, and a document at the New York-Historical Society describes Morgan taking revenge on the person he blamed for Anne’s desertion.
Ever since Bessie had begun her work on behalf of the French theater, her friends had expected her to receive the Légion d’Honneur. Sardou wrote a letter of recommendation, as did Rostand, Richepin, three American ambassadors, the French Ambassador Jusserand, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. “I want the Legion of Honor for Bessie Marbury,” Henry Adams told John Hay in September 1904—Hay had recently received the Legion’s Grand Cross for his work on behalf of world peace: “Sardou is superintending the affair, and all the French literarers are in it, writing letters for her. Please write somebody a letter saying how glad you would be to have her under your command.… I will get La Farge to march in your regiment too, and Falstaff never had two funnier recruits than La Farge and Bessy Marbury.
“Miss Marbury has only one thing against her … —she has done more than everyone else together to get for America a real grip on French interests. She has the whole French literary, theatrical, class in her pocket. She is the only Legionary,—or will be,—of the American lot, (including yourself) who has done real service.”
After World War I there was further reason to honor Miss Marbury, as she had raised money for French charities and given the Villa Trianon to be used as a hospital between 1914 and 1918. Moreover, both Anne and Elsie had received the Croix de Guerre—Anne for organizing an American Committee for Devastated France, with offices in Paris and Blérancourt, that provided housing, food, clothing, clinics, and medical supplies throughout the war; she was awarded the Legion of Honor as well. In 1920 Bessie wrote to her friend James Hazen Hyde, a wealthy American living in Paris, to find out why she had never received a medal.
Hyde left among his papers a memorandum saying that in response to Bessie’s letter he had called on his friend Bob Bacon and learned the answer. Bacon, appointed ambassador to France by President Taft at the end of 1910, had arrived with a specific nongovernmental mission: “J. P. Morgan, Sr., to whom he was under great obligation, had asked him to do only one thing when he went abroad as Ambassador,” wrote Hyde—and that was “to block [Elisabeth Marbury’s] getting the Legion of Honor. Morgan said she had stolen his daughter, Anne, away from him and prejudiced her against him. Marbury [had] said to Miss Morgan that her father compromised her by using her as a chaperone when he travelled with his mistress, Mrs. Douglas.”
This story may well be true, but its foundations are shaky. Bacon was ambassador for less than two years, in 1911–12, and it seems unlikely that his veto would have been sustained for another decade. Moreover, Hyde said that Bessie’s letter, written on April 7, 1920, had prompted his informative call on Bacon. Bob Bacon died on May 29, 1919.
* The former Florence Jaffray Hurst, whose father was head of a steamship company and president of the New York Yacht Club, had been schooled with the Morgan girls at 219, and married J. Borden Harriman, a banker and first cousin of E. H. Harriman, in 1889. Active in Democratic politics, Daisy Hurst Harriman was appointed U.S. minister to Norway by Franklin Roosevelt in 1937.
† The Colony Club moved uptown to a building designed by Delano & Aldrich at 560 Park Avenue in 1924.
‡ One of his relatives was party to the famous 1803 case, Marbury v. Madison, which established a precedent for the Supreme Court to rule on the doctrine of judicial review.
§ According to Fry, the Frenchman in New York so longed for London “that he goes close to the subway exits parce que c’est la même odeur que celle du Tuppeny Tube.” Fry had found a kindred spirit: “Like all other Europeanised people here we make signals of distress to one another in this weltering waste of the American people. It is strange what an invariable bond of sympathy this instinctive hatred of America as it exists to-day is—tho’ many believe in the future. I suppose I do, as I’m investing so much in it.…”
‖ Anne noted running into “Bosdari & de Beauvoir” in France in the fall of 1907, and he was listed, with Morgan, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, and Joseph Choate as a member of the American Dante Society in 1908. He was finally caught in London as an unregistered alien under the name of Brémont in 1917, and sentenced to three years in jail. Jack professed himself “highly pleased” that Bosdari had been “found, tried, and convicted, even after all these years.”
Chapter 26
BACK NUMBER?
In the winter of 1901, news of the U.S. Steel deal had prompted talk of an imperial Morgan ruling the world, and a 1902 cartoon portrayed him as “the Field Marshall of Industry” with his arms circling the globe. By late 1903, a combination of the Northern Securities suit, the failure of the U.S. Steel bond-conversion plan, and the difficulties of the IMM had bred rumors of Morgan’s imminent retirement and collapse. As more trouble followed, financial insiders on both sides of the Atlantic concluded that “the old man” was over the hill.
On March 14, 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that the Northern Securities Company constituted an illegal combination in restraint of trade and would have to be dissolved.
The range of judicial opinion in this case, in which two lower courts had come to opposite conclusions, reflected the country’s abiding confusion about competition, monopoly, and regulation under the antitrust law. Writing for the majority, Justice John M. Harlan contended that the combination of previously competing roads in itself violated the Sherman law, even if the combination did not have greater market power than the individual roads and did not commit illegal acts. “If Congress has not, by the words used in the [Sherman] Act, described this and like cases,” argued Harlan, “it would, we apprehend, be impossible to find words that would describe them.” Without this kind of judicial interpretation, he continued, “the efforts of the national government to preserve to the people the benefits of free competition among carriers engaged in interstate commerce will be wholly unavailing, and all transcontinental lines, indeed the entire railway systems of the country, may be absorbed, merged and consolidated, thus placing the public at the absolute mercy of the holding corporation.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes strongly disagreed. Appointed to the Court by Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes began his first dissent with an argument for the judiciary’s independence of politics in words that have become famous: “Great cases like hard cases make bad law,” he wrote, for “great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. These immediate interests exercise a kind of hydraulic pressure which makes what previously was clear seem doubtful, and before which even well-settled principles of law will bend.”
The “accident of immediate overwhelming interest” exerting pre
ssure on the law in 1904 was the country’s hatred of the trusts. Holmes did not think that one company’s ownership of previously independent companies violated the Sherman Act, since the act said nothing about competition or numbers of competitors—it ruled out only agreements that restricted commerce, and if it were to be construed in such general terms as those argued by the government, Holmes could “see no part of the conduct of life with which on similar principles Congress might not interfere.” To make his point clearer, he suggested imagining that the parties in the case were small grocers rather than giant railroads: “There is a natural feeling that somehow or other the [antitrust] statute meant to strike at combinations great enough to cause just anxiety on the part of those who love their country more than money, while it viewed such little ones as I have mentioned with just indifference.” In other words, Holmes would not rule out combinations on grounds of size: he thought the legal question ought to concern their effect on commerce.
Roosevelt had set out to establish the federal government’s power to control corporations, and had just won a major, popular victory over Morgan and Wall Street, eight months before a presidential election. He felt betrayed by Holmes. Having expected this intellectual Bostonian, his first appointment to the Court, to agree with him, he fumed: “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that.” Holmes dined at the White House two weeks after the decision was announced, but the subject of the case did not come up. Many years later, he told a friend that his Northern Securities dissent “broke up” his “incipient friendship” with Roosevelt, who saw it as “a political departure (or, I suspect, more truly, couldn’t forgive anyone who stood in his way). We talked freely later but it never was the same after that.”*