Morgan

by Jean Strouse

  † Mellen made highly contradictory statements about his relations with Morgan. Though he denied to the Times that he was just following orders in May of 1912, he had told Clarence W. Barron of the Boston News Bureau in 1911: “I wear the Morgan collar, but I am proud of it.” To another reporter in 1912 he said: “If Mr. Morgan were to order me tomorrow to China or Siberia in his interests, I would pack up and go.” After Morgan died, Mellen was forced to resign from the nearly bankrupt New Haven road. Louis Brandeis ascribed the company’s troubles to “banker mismanagement,” and congressional investigations found serious ethical and financial abuses. The New Haven failure bears some resemblance to that of the IMM. Vincent Carosso, after examining the former in detail, concluded: “It does not serve Morgan’s reputation to excuse his lack of vigilance by attributing it to old age or long absences from the office.… The inescapable fact is that he erred seriously in several respects. He had misjudged Mellen, failed to keep adequately informed of his policies and methods, and had overestimated New England’s future growth and the New Haven’s capacity to earn enough money to meet the fixed charges on the huge debt imposed upon it, much less maintain its regular dividend payments. Morgan also discounted too readily the potential for competition from the growing automobile and trucking industries, about which he appears to have been poorly informed. Not the least of his mistakes was his inability to appreciate the extent to which the Progressive protest had changed the nation’s mood, especially the public’s growing suspicion of big business.”

  ‡ The Morgan bank in 1912 hoped to end hostilities between Turkey and the Balkan states by issuing loans to both sides, on condition that they accept American mediation. The plan originated with Morgan’s partner Herman Harjes in Paris and the U.S. ambassador to France, Myron Herrick. Jack finally decided against it, thinking the money would be used to continue rather than stop the war. John dos Passos later said that “old man Morgan, before his death, worked hard to avert the coming war,” but the effort appears to have come largely from his partners.

  § Jack told President Wilson in 1914 that the investigation had been “offered” to the Morgan Bank for $40,000, through “underground channels”—and the Stanley Committee steel inquiry to Judge Gary for $10,000—but that “we had never bought anybody yet and did not propose to begin with that sort of person.”

  ‖ In 1932, Belle read in BB’s Italian Pictures of the Renaissance that he had demoted the work, rating it only “G.P.”—“in great part” by Filippo Lippi. She wrote: “To me-ow and scratch, I must say that the ‘G.P.’ after our Fra Filippo Lippi would have saved us much money had it been contained in your original letter to Duveen.” The Metropolitan Museum bought the altarpiece in 1935, and attributes it to Filippo Lippi.

  a These accolades did not satisfy Morgan’s survivors. The Satterlees were hurt that the Italian King did not pay his personal respects to the memory of “one who had rendered Italy no inappreciable services,” reported Herman Harjes, who had raced down from Paris to help out in Rome. And they were all “a little put out” that the British ambassador had not called, especially in light of the “exceedingly courteous” message and tribute from the Kaiser. To prevent a similar slight in France, Harjes telegraphed the American ambassador in Paris to see that the French government rendered some honor—which it did “in a very handsome way” at Le Havre. Harjes told Grenfell he hoped the European governments’ recognition of Morgan’s “great work and personality” would “counteract in some way the antagonistic and unsympathetic attitude of our Government in America.”

  b Designed for Morgan by the Hartford architect George Keller in 1892, this imposing rectangular monolith of hand-polished stone, carved with a mix of medieval, Christian, and ancient symbols, stands at the center of the plot surrounded by maples and oaks. Headstones for four generations of Morgans face the points of the compass—Joseph and Sarah north, Junius and Juliet east, Pierpont and Fanny west, Jack and Jessie south.

  AFTERWORD

  Belle Greene told Berenson in April 1913 that Morgan’s $50,000 bequest would take care of her alone but not her family. She was earning $10,000 a year, she wrote, and could not afford to quit: “If some day by hook or by crook—(I guess it would have to be by crook!)—I could put together $100,000 for my family I could get up and leave with a clear conscience. I might as well dream of a million.” Still, she may not altogether have wanted to leave. For the next three decades, as she and Jack added to the library’s collections, she played a major role in international scholarship concerning manuscripts and rare books. Her relations with Berenson gradually subsided into friendship. She retired in 1948, and died two years later.

  Jack put his father’s art collections, with the exception of the materials at the library, on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1914—it was the only time they were all on view together (Morgan himself never saw them assembled in one place), and the museum drew a record number of visitors that year. Jack also had the collections quietly appraised, primarily by Fairfax Murray and Hercules Read. He hoped to raise $10 million to $15 million to fulfill his father’s cash bequests and cover the New York State inheritance tax. As word of potential sales got out, The New York Times announced, ALL THE WORLD SEEKS MORGAN ART—and reported that experts in Paris, London, and New York considered it “the finest private collection” in existence.

  To Duveen Brothers early in 1915, Jack sold the Chinese porcelains (for $3 million), the Fragonard panels (for about $1 million—Henry Clay Frick promptly bought them for $1.25 million), and much of the eighteenth-century French furniture, for $2 million. Also leaving the Metropolitan Museum in 1915–16 were Morgan’s tapestries (sold to P. W. French & Co.) and his Renaissance bronzes and Limoges enamels (most of both collections were bought by Duveen and sold to Frick). When the director of the museum, Edward Robinson, expressed regret at the withdrawal of these works, Jack replied: “I am very sorry that there should be anything in what I do to make the Museum unhappy, and very much regret that you should have been made unhappy too.” He said he had warned Robinson that the collections would be “probably very materially reduced,” and “I am sure that you will realize the difference between loans and gifts.”

  In his father’s name, at the beginning of 1916, Jack gave the Met Raphael’s Colonna altarpiece and the superb medieval part of the Hoentschel collection (including the two sculptures, the Entombment and Pietà, from the Château de Biron). A year later (also as from his father) he gave the museum approximately 7,000 additional objects, estimated by Belle to be worth about $8 million—among them Assyrian, Egyptian, and classical antiquities; collections of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic enamels and ivories; medieval and Renaissance metalwork, sculpture, jewelry, and amber; French pottery of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; the Negroli helmet; a collection of snuffboxes and other small jeweled and ornamented caskets; several paintings; and works of Asian and Islamic art. Most of these objects were exhibited in the new Pierpont Morgan Wing until 1943, when, with the permission of Morgan’s heirs, they were dispersed throughout the museum.

  Morgan had said in his will that he hoped Jack would include the Wadsworth Atheneum in the disposition of his collections, and in 1917 Jack gave about 1,300 fine objects to the museum in Hartford, including ancient bronzes and glass, Italian Renaissance majolica, silver-gilt works and ivories from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Venetian glass, English ceramics, and porcelains from Germany and France.

  Among the Morgan paintings, Lawrence’s portrait of Miss Farren—the beautiful silver-haired actress dressed in silk and fur—aroused the greatest popular interest. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., asked Jack in April 1915 whether he might buy the picture directly, and whether, if the paintings were to be sold as a group, Jack might not be willing to give him “first call” on the Lawrence. Frick also offered to buy Elizabeth Farren and Reynolds’s Lady Betty Delmé: “I would like very much to have two full lengths for my dining room, and would be willing to pay you $500
,000 prompt cash for these two pictures.” In the estate, the Lawrence was valued at $125,000, the Reynolds at $175,000.

  Jack decided to keep Miss Farren himself. Once the estate was settled in 1916, each of Morgan’s children chose several paintings (Louisa took Reynolds’s Lady Delmé, Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire, and a Canaletto). Jack sold many of his father’s paintings through M. Knoedler & Co. between 1935 and 1943: Vermeer’s Lady Writing was eventually given by the Havemeyer family to the National Gallery in 1966; the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the Filippo Lippi Saint Lawrence Enthroned with Donors in 1935, and received Miss Farren with the bequest of Edward S. Harkness in 1940; the Trustees of the Frick Collection bought Rembrandt’s Nicolaes Ruts through Knoedler in 1943.

  In 1919 Jack offered his house at Princes Gate to the U.S. government for use as the American embassy, and the offer was accepted in 1922. Among the ambassadors who lived there were Andrew Mellon, Robert Worth Bingham, and Joseph P. Kennedy. The house now serves as headquarters for the Royal College of General Practitioners. Jack sold Dover House to the London County Council for £120,000 in 1920, and Cragston to a real-estate development syndicate in 1927; the house at Cragston was destroyed by fire in 1948.

  Jack gave the McKim library and its contents to New York City as a public museum and research facility early in 1924, with an endowment of $1.5 million. After Fanny died that fall, the brownstone at 219 Madison Avenue was torn down, and in 1928 an annex designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris extended the library all the way to Madison Avenue: the new exhibition hall and reading room were connected to the original building by a “cloister” gallery.

  Dr. James Markoe was shot and killed at St. George’s Church in 1919 by an assassin who mistook him for Jack.

  Jack remained head of the bank until he died in Boca Grande, Florida, at the age of seventy-five, in 1943.

  SELECT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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