The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

by Ron Chernow

  Betty Morrow expressed both elation and bitterness at the appointment. The Morrows had just decided to build a new home in Englewood, and she didn’t want their lives disrupted. She didn’t see Coolidge as a transcendental philosopher: “The blow has fallen! President Coolidge wrote to Dwight today asking him to be Ambassador to Mexico and Dwight is going to do it. It is a hard job, and not much honor, and it comes late. . . . Coolidge won’t run again, but Dwight goes and does a hard job for him when there is no chance of reward. How characteristic!21 Betty sarcastically told friends that Coolidge was like a father who had given away valuable gifts and thrown Dwight a little tin whistle at the end.

  Morrow was sufficiently pessimistic about Mexico to say privately that the best he could do was get Mexico off the front page. Lamont advised him against taking the post, saying the turmoil of a pending presidential campaign made it an inauspicious time for action. Friends concurred and were aghast that Dwight would surrender a Morgan partnership for such a risky position. Even Lindbergh was dubious: “From what little I have seen at our border stops, I am afraid that the position will be a difficult one.”22

  The Mexicans were also wary of Morrow, believing he would function as a collection agent for the New York banks. They chanted, “First Morrow, then the marines.” The fear was unjustified. The Lamont-led bankers’ committee for Mexico was less interested in military action than in peaceful negotiations to get Mexico to resume debt repayment. They wanted stability, not further turmoil, in Mexico. In the end, it would be the Mexicans who would be pleasantly surprised by Dwight Morrow and the House of Morgan that would feel embittered and betrayed.

  AS ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow patented a new style for a gringo emissary in Latin America—warm and voluble, treating Mexicans as peers, not wayward children. Soon after his arrival, he told the local U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it should respect Mexican sovereignty. (With slight embarrassment, he had to write the White House and ask for a photograph of Coolidge to hang above his desk—another telltale sign of the distance between the two.) Morrow developed a close rapport with President Calles and would casually drop in on him, like an old friend. They would breakfast at Calles’s ranch or tour Mexican dams and irrigation works together. Morrow’s friendly, trusting manner contrasted with that of his predecessor, James R. Sheffield, who had treated nonwhites patronizingly, taken a pro-invasion stand toward Mexico, and studiously served the interests of American oil companies.

  Morrow not only respected Mexican culture but liked the easygoing informality of the people. He and Betty spent weekends at Casa Mafiaña, a villa in the semitropical town of Cuernavaca. It overlooked two volcanoes and overflowed with Mexican pottery and Indian handicrafts. Morrow commissioned Diego Rivera, the left-wing Mexican muralist, to paint frescoes at the Cortes Palace, including one that depicted the revolutionist Zapata. To improve U.S.-Mexican relations, he even brought down Will Rogers to tour with him and Calles. While Rogers was there, Morrow threw a banquet complete with Mexican songs and dance. At one point, the ebullient Morrow said to Rogers with a smile, “Imagine going to war with a people like this!”23

  Sometimes Morrow seemed more popular among Mexicans than in the American colony. The public debate about Mexico in the United States became more inflammatory in late 1927. William Randolph Hearst nursed a grudge against President Calles after the latter appropriated sections of his gigantic Babicora Ranch. That November, the Hearst newspapers ran sensational articles purportedly showing Mexican plots against the United States. Some observers thought Hearst was not only expressing pique against Calles but was deliberately fomenting trouble for Dwight Morrow; the isolationist Hearst had always disliked the Anglophile House of Morgan. On December 9, 1927, the twenty-six Hearst papers published documents that supposedly outlined a Mexican plot to bribe four U.S. senators with over $1 million. These documents were later exposed as forgeries, but in the meantime they damaged relations with Mexico.

  BEFORE leaving for Mexico, Morrow had invited Charles Lindbergh to his East Sixty-sixth Street apartment. Acting on a suggestion from Walter Lippmann, Morrow proposed that the young aviator pilot The Spirit of St. Louis to Mexico as a goodwill gesture. Lindbergh liked the idea. He had flown to Paris on a spring day, and before donating his plane to a museum, he wanted to prove the practicality of night and winter flights. To strengthen the political message, Lindbergh suggested a flight linking Washington and Mexico City.

  So on December 14, 1927, with rifle, machete, and tropical medicine on board, Lindbergh took off through stormy night skies. It was a few days after the Hearst “expose” and a perilous moment in U.S.-Mexican relations. When the sun rose the next morning, Lindbergh sailed through a cloudless Mexican morning but couldn’t figure out where he was. He dipped low enough to read the names of a hotel and train stations and briefly thought all Mexican towns were named Caballeros, because he kept seeing that sign at the stations. Then he spotted a sign for Toluca, a town about fifty miles from Mexico City.

  Sharing picnic sandwiches and lemonade, Morrow and President Calles awaited Lindbergh in sweltering heat at Valbuena Airport, where a special grandstand was set up for dignitaries. Morrow nervously paced up and down. When Lindbergh landed—six hours late—a crowd of Mexicans estimated at 150,000 rushed exuberantly across the field. As Lindbergh accompanied Morrow and Calles to their car, they were thronged by shouting, delirious spectators. They rode to the embassy in triumph, horns blaring, horses rearing, and crowds posted “on trees, on telegraph poles, tops of cars, roofs, even the towers of the Cathedral,” as Betty Morrow recalled. “Flowers and confetti were flung every moment.”24

  Lindbergh spent Christmas at the embassy with the Morrows and took Calles on his first plane ride. He also took notice of Dwight’s daughter, Anne, on vacation from her senior year at Smith College. She was a shy, pretty poetess, as slight of build as Charles was rangy and with Betty’s heavy eyebrows. Lindbergh liked the fact that when he first sat next to her, she didn’t ask any questions. Theirs was the strong bond of two shy people who had found each other.

  Morrow hadn’t especially liked the young men his daughters dated—Anne and Elisabeth having gone out with Corliss Lamont, among others. He approved of Charles Lindbergh as a “nice clean boy” who didn’t drink, smoke, or see girls.25 But when Anne announced that she and Charles wanted to get married, Morrow seemed flabbergasted. “He’s going to marry Anne? What do we know about this young man?” he asked.26 He insisted they be engaged first and get to know each other better. Despite his flustered reaction, Morrow was very fond of Charles and would beam with gee-whiz delight when he narrated his aviation adventures.

  On May 27, 1929, Anne and Charles were married at the Morrows’ new Georgian mansion in Englewood, called Next Day Hill. It was an event of such fascination worldwide that the Morrows had to fool the press and bill it as a prewedding party. Even the guests were told only to drop by for lunch and a bridge game. Then Anne suddenly appeared in a white chiffon wedding gown, and a brisk ceremony took place. Only after Anne and Charles had changed clothes and escaped through the back door did Dwight and Betty broadcast the news to reporters. The young couple briefly stayed at the Leffingwell house in Oyster Bay during their secretive honeymoon, and the servants were threatened with dismissal if they mentioned the couple’s presence to tradespeople in town.

  It was a strong, intense match but one riddled with contradictions. Anne was the daughter of a former Morgan partner and had imbibed her father’s idealism and internationalism. Charles’s father, who had died in 1924, was the populist Minnesota congressman who had instigated the Pujo hearings, fulminated against the Money Trust and the Morgan cabal with the Federal Reserve Bank, and castigated the bankers who dragged America into the war. The congressman’s son inherited his father’s suspicion of eastern bankers and would never entirely slough it off. In the late 1930s, his isolationism would place him at odds with the House of Morgan and create a painful dilemma for Anne. But in the late 1920s, he
socialized with the Morrows and Guggenheims and thrilled the Davisons by taking their beach-party guests at Peacock Point for seaplane rides.

  THOSE who saw Ambassador Morrow as a proxy for the House of Morgan in Mexico were in for a rude shock. The ambassador already had a separate political agenda, Morrow having confided to Walter Lippmann that he coveted a seat in the U.S. Senate. Hence, he needed to distance himself from the bank. During the 1928 presidential campaign, he was already being toasted as a potential senatorial candidate at Republican dinners. It was now in Morrow’s political interest to function as a sensitive, fair-minded arbiter in settling Mexican disputes.

  Morrow had quick success with the long-running oil controversy. He developed an ingenious scheme of “perpetual concessions” for American oil companies. It gave them new concessions on pre-1917 wells, while Mexico saved face and retained theoretical ownership. This rational statesmanship delighted Walter Lippmann, who told Morrow afterward, “There is a disposition in some quarters to ascribe it to some kind of private magic which you have at your disposal.”27 For Lippmann, Morrow qualified as the most talented public man of his generation, far beyond the common run of politicians.

  Another major dispute involved the Catholic church. Calles had tried to nationalize church lands, and the violent Cristeros movement had arisen in protest. A state of war existed in parts of Mexico, with thousands of men marching under the church’s banner. Morrow smuggled Walter Lippmann into the country on a secret diplomatic mission. They negotiated a compromise under which Calles agreed not to interfere with the church while Mexican priests agreed to call off their protest strike. Morrow and Lippmann sold the deal to the Vatican, and the settlement reopened the churches. One morning in Cuernavaca, Betty and Dwight were awakened by the ringing of church bells. “Betty, I have opened the churches,” Dwight said, laughing. “Now perhaps you will wish me to close them again.”28

  The most frustrating area for Morrow was, ironically, the foreign debt. By 1928, Mexico had been in default for fourteen years, and its budgetary situation worsened with the lower oil revenues. In a desperate mood, bankers didn’t see how Mexico could satisfy all its creditors. The country owed money to the foreign bondholders represented by Lamont as well as to western U.S. railroads and domestic lenders. Lamont thought the two hundred thousand bondholders he represented should have first claim. He argued that they had patiently waited many years for payment. Morrow, in contrast, favored a comprehensive settlement for all creditors, on the model of a bankruptcy settlement. He feared that if Mexico struck a series of separate deals, it would promise more money than it could deliver. To Lamont, the notion of one big settlement was an impractical dream that would only penalize his bondholders. And it would be so cumbersome that nobody would ever get paid.

  A heated feud arose between Morrow and Lamont. Although he would never admit it, Lamont had secret reservations about Morrow. He would later eulogize him as “sparkling, brilliant, whimsical, lovable,” yet he thought Morrow had an unearned reputation for sainthood. There was perhaps envy here, a feeling that Morrow threatened his own image as the leading liberal banker. Posing as Morrow’s friend, Lamont gave Harold Nicolson a 125-page critique of a draft of Nicolson’s biography of Morrow and reproached him for idealizing his subject. Morrow and Lamont were perhaps too much alike to be completely fooled by one another. Each was more worldly and ambitious than he cared to admit.

  It’s hard to know whether Lamont found Morrow’s position on Mexican debt a political ploy to separate himself from 23 Wall or a quixotic plan that only an absentminded professor could espouse. In any event, by 1929 Lamont decided to break with the Morrow-inspired State Department plan for a comprehensive debt settlement. He circulated bitter memos at 23 Wall Street, sarcastically referring to Morrow as the ambassador. The ICBM, he warned, “will be by no means content to stand by idly for a year while the ambassador is perfecting his Government claims.” A few days later, Lamont informed his partners that he planned to cut a separate bargain with Mexico “despite Ambassador’s attitude.”29 George Rublee, the legal adviser to the U.S. embassy in Mexico and a close friend of Morrow’s, later said, “Mr. Lamont would rather take his chances and get what he could ahead of somebody else than to cooperate in a general settlement.”30

  For all his charm, Lamont could play rough when crossed. He tried to figure out an elegant way to get rid of Morrow while appearing to help him. In November 1929, he had Martin Egan hand a letter to President Hoover that recommended Morrow as secretary of war. Lamont stressed that Morrow knew nothing of the request—implying that Hoover should keep the suggestion confidential. He doubted his stratagem would work, however, owing to Hoover’s insecurity in the face of Morrow’s massive intellect. “Dwight was so brilliant that he would talk around [the president] in circles,” Lamont said.31 Hoover had already rebuffed an earlier request from Calvin Coolidge to appoint Morrow as his secretary of state. Hoover didn’t rise to Lamont’s bait. Close to Morrow—they spoke several times weekly—the president wasn’t eager to advance a potential political competitor.

  That month, two events made Lamont’s exertions unnecessary. On November 12, Hoover appointed Morrow to represent the United States at the upcoming Naval Conference in London. Later in the month, New Jersey governor Larson asked Morrow if he would fill the brief time remaining in the unexpired term of Senator Walter E. Edge, who had just been appointed ambassador to France. A deal was struck whereby David Baird would occupy the Senate seat with the understanding that he would step aside if Morrow wanted to campaign for the Republican nomination in the spring. This provided Morrow with further incentives to oppose Lamont on the debt issue and eliminate his former Morgan partnership as a potential campaign issue.

  In December, the simmering political dispute between Morrow and Lamont boiled over. By this point, Morrow, the liberal do-gooder, had moved into the position of self-appointed overlord of Mexico’s finances. The man who had held back the marines now minutely reviewed Mexico’s budget. When Lamont’s assistant, Vernon Munroe, met with Morrow, he was shocked by the extent to which the ambassador wanted to dictate Mexican financial policy. According to Munroe, Morrow wanted to cut the Mexican budget by “eliminating the courthouse entirely, cutting 2.5 million off the education appropriation, one million pesos off the public health, 2.5 million pesos off statistics and some 4 million pesos off communications.”32 Under the guise of helping his Mexican brothers, Dwight seemed to succumb to delusions of grandeur.

  During the May-June campaign for the Republican Senate nomination in New Jersey, Morrow was still serving as Mexican ambassador, and as such he followed the debt situation. Then a campaign blunder drastically reduced his influence in that post. While he was at the London Naval Conference, his military attache in Mexico, Colonel Alexander J. MacNab, made a speech in which he extravagantly praised Morrow’s role in Mexican reform. He actually made Lamont’s point—that Morrow was intruding more in Mexican domestic affairs than any Wall Street banker. “There is no department of government in Mexico which he has not advised and directed,” MacNab said of Morrow. “He took the Secretary of Finance under his wing and taught him finance.”33 The Mexican press treated the speech as a scandal. It made Mexican officials look as if they were the ambassador’s puppets, and Morrow never again had the same influence in Mexico. Nevertheless, he won the Republican nomination.

  During the summer of 1930, Morrow kept flying down to Mexico to advise on the debt. The Morrow-Lamont dispute resulted in some blistering exchanges. Morrow kept urging Lamont to lecture the finance minister about the growing Mexican budget; Lamont did this, then regretted it. In a July 24 letter, his pent-up contempt for Morrow surfaced: “I have a feeling that you are a bit disgusted with our mental processes up here and are genuinely upset that we are unable to adopt in toto your point of view.” He referred to a talk with the finance minister: “He retorted by telling me politely that it was really none of my business. . . . Now, my dear Dwight, you may have some means
of compelling the Finance Minister to give you precise information as to his budget plans for several years ahead, but I must confess that in any such effort I, myself, am powerless.” In the end, Lamont bluntly warned Morrow to stay away from his debt settlement with Mexico: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting the matter rest where it is rather than feeling called upon to defeat this plan.”34 In a cool reply, Morrow repeated that Mexico was bankrupt and should treat creditors equally. He warned Lamont that if he persisted in his course, he would ultimately have to deal with the State Department.35

  The day after Lamont wrote Morrow—without awaiting a reply—he signed a separate accord at 23 Wall with a representative of Mexico’s Chamber of Commerce. It nearly halved Mexico’s debt, reducing it from $508 million to $267 million, in one stroke. True to his threats, Morrow advised Mexico to delay ratification, but his influence with President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, Calles’s successor, was much diminished. As it turned out, the feud between the two Morgan men was for naught. Mexico kept postponing the date of debt repayment, and the whole farce would collapse by 1932. The outcome would have been laughable had it not consumed so much of Lamont’s life and impoverished small Mexican bondholders. By 1941, Mexican debt had shrunk to $49.6 million, or a tenth of the original amount.

  Although Morrow’s break with the House of Morgan was now complete, the association haunted him in the Senate race that fall. As one New Jersey paper described his opponent’s strategy: “The Ambassador was to be pictured to New Jersey voters as the tool and puppet of Big Business interests, and his candidacy as a Wall Street conspiracy to capture the Presidency via the U.S. Senate route.”36