by Jean Strouse
Jack’s relations with his father included no such intimate confidences. Longing for paternal notice (“Do you think there is any chance of Papa coming up here?” he asked Fanny one spring from St. Paul’s—“I don’t suppose he can but don’t you think there may be some chance?”), he tried not to be disappointed when promised visits were canceled or cut short.
Most transactions between father and son in these years involved money. Jack needed permission for everything he bought, even collars and hats, and approached each negotiation with dread: “Papa hates so to have me come to him about money matters,” he told his mother, and “I don’t want to do anything … Papa wouldn’t like.” Hoping to join the St. Paul’s Racket Club in 1883, he braced himself for refusal: “Of course if Papa thinks it is too expensive a luxury there is nothing more to say.” “Papa” gave permission, Fanny sent thirty dollars, and Jack became an avid tennis, squash, and racquets player. Pierpont in fact granted most of Jack’s requests, when he found time to listen to them, but the boy invariably expected him not to.
During his own school years, Pierpont had had freer charge of his own purse, and been so impatient to do his father’s work that he formed a mock partnership with Jim Goodwin. He collected autographs of famous men, carried diplomatic papers to Paris for James Buchanan, and avidly studied history, languages, Europe, and girls.
Jack, commenting to his mother on an editorial in New York’s Evening Post, reflected: “I cannot see that a protective tariff is necessary or beneficial but then I am not old enough to have thought very profoundly on the subject.” Elected editor of the St. Paul’s paper, he hoped it would teach him “to act for myself on my own responsibility. You see, I am very deficient in self-reliance.” On receiving a scolding from the St. Paul’s headmaster, he reported that “the only thing it has done is to make me think that perhaps I had better have died a very small boy.” He was slated to go to Harvard after St. Paul’s, but contemplating the entrance exams, he moaned, “I wish there were no such place as Harvard.” He and his mother decided he would not be ready in the fall of 1884, and persuaded Pierpont to let him put off “the evil day” for a year. In January 1885 Jack moved to Boston for tutoring in science, writing, English, and Greek, and entered Harvard that fall with the class of 1889.
Visiting her son at Harvard one spring, Fanny wrote to Louisa that she found Boston with its “plain living and high thinking” more congenial than New York, “for I do not feel here as if the place were too big for me, and my training not sufficient to teach me how to fill it!” Pierpont, who did not share his wife’s fondness for plain living and high thinking, had long since ceased objecting to her absence. By the mid-eighties, she was spending several months each summer and fall in Europe with a daughter and a paid companion; her husband went abroad in the winter and spring.
Fanny sought emotional solace from Louisa as well as Jack, but her daughter’s ministering talents were already spoken for, which put Fanny in an awkward position. She approved of Louisa as Pierpont’s companion whenever the adult Morgans were on opposite sides of the Atlantic—which by now was most of the time—probably because she did not want the job to fall to anyone else: “[I] trust you to keep your Father’s life as cheerful as it can be, while you are at home with him,” she wrote one July on her way to Europe with the other girls. Still, she resented being deprived of her favorite daughter’s company—especially once Jack went away to school—and continued a month later, “You do not know how much I wish you were with us—yet how glad I am you stay to make ‘home’ for your Father.” Fanny’s tyrannical dependence on Louisa suggests some of what her husband may have been seeking to escape.
She complained bitterly of loneliness whenever she was separated from Louisa, to whom she insisted that neither Juliet nor Anne could make up the difference: they were too young, and “I do not want them to feel with me as you would do naturally, if you were only here. And yet it is wrong to sadden your youth any more than it must be saddened.” Her message had the intended effect—it made Louisa cry, and reply, “I wish I could have been at home to help you as you say I could have done. I felt reproached to have been having a good time while you were really suffering.”
If Fanny did not hear from Louisa as often as she liked, she scolded, “When you are so silent I get a feeling that you are not real, and that I have imagined the close friendship between us!” Then a letter full of “loving thoughtfulness” cleared off her “blues”: “It was worth having them to have brought out from you such tender sympathetic expressions.” One night she wrote: “Goodnight my precious daughter, how I would love to take you in my arms, lay my head on your shoulder, and have about five minutes of cry! Your shoulders are so soft, and your clasp so tender and loving!”
She reflected indirectly on her marriage after a minor episode at Dover House one summer. Feeling a “little chill” from Junius, she confessed to Louisa that it made her “horribly blue and disappointed,” and concluded, “I suppose … I look for more love than I have any right to expect, and that is the trouble.” Her children’s love had not failed her so far, but “later it may be that you also will find me sometimes a dull and unsatisfactory companion, for though I have the power of winning love I do not seem to have the power of keeping it. That time (of your all finding me out) has not come yet!”
Fanny’s sad reproaches worked less well with her husband than with Louisa, but one autumn they elicited an extraordinary response. She had been traveling all summer, pelting him with complaints about his failure to write, and was at Dover House in September when he finally took up a pen. He led off with local news—a Cragston ball had gone well; William Henry Osborn was ill—then addressed her grievance: “I note all you say … about writing and wish I could make you understand my feelings on that subject.” As often when caught between demands of desire and duty, his conflict took physical form: it was not that he would not comply with Fanny’s wishes—for some mysterious reason he could not. The problem was “the difficulty of writing the principal one being writing one word when I mean another these constant mishaps throw me into such a state of depression that I get quite exhausted and after I have written I am completely used up and unfit for anything else for hours.”
He continued, “I would gladly give all I have of this world’s goods and commence anew if I could only sit down and write as I would so gladly do even every day.” He did not understand his bizarre condition, “nor do I want to worry as it seems confined to writing but I cannot bear to be misunderstood or be considered [he left out the adjective—derelict?] by anyone, beyond everyone either you or Father. I don’t know as I make it intelligible now but I write this in justice to myself. If I can over come it which I shall try to do I shall be I think the happiest mortal living.”
He never again mentioned this problem, which seems singularly well designed to get him out of something he didn’t want to do.
Louisa genuinely cared for both her parents, and accepted her unusual obligations to them both. If she preferred one to the other she never let on. Nonetheless, she had to be nursemaid-parent-confidante to her mother, keeping her shoulders and sympathies ready twenty-four hours a day. For her father she served as filial consort, traveling through Europe’s cultural capitals, meeting eminent people, tending to his domestic needs in New York. Only in the privacy of her diary did she indicate the difficulty of her situation. A long talk with Fanny late one night left her exhausted—“Of course it was mostly apropos of the old sore subject. Perhaps she is right that I brood over it until I exagerate [sic] it to myself. Still it is not imagination on my part and the position of judge is too often forced upon me for me to forget it for any time. It is very hard to be so helpless to do anything for those you love best in the world!”
Whenever she went to London with her father she saw another wretched marriage up close. In April of 1883, Pierpont’s mother asked him and Louisa to stay with her at Princes Gate, but he chose Junius and Dover House instead. Louisa and Mary Burns cal
led on Juliet one afternoon. They found her wandering downstairs in her nightgown, her hair in crimping pins, saying she had gone to bed because “she was so lonely and no one had been to see her.” Mary asked her to go back upstairs or at least put on a dressing gown in front of the servants, which infuriated Juliet: “she told Aunt Mary not to interfere with her,” Louisa reported, “and that if any one had paid her any attention … she would not have had to go to bed.” The threesome sat in the library for fifteen minutes, until Juliet went back upstairs. Frightened and shocked, Louisa told her mother: “Grandma is as queer as she can be and does nothing but complain of our neglect of her, whenever I see her. Poor old lady I am sorry for her, and yet she is so selfish in it all, and so cruel to Grandpa.”
Junius now spent three months every winter in Rome. He was there on February 22, 1884, when Juliet woke up at Princes Gate with her arms and face twitching. Several hours later she had a seizure, and never regained consciousness. She died the next day with Mary Burns at her side.
It took her husband forty-eight hours to reach London by Rapide Train-de-Luxe. He told Pierpont that all traces of suffering had disappeared from Juliet’s face, which made death seem “like the peaceful holy sleep of a child.” She had regained the “beautiful countenance of her early years,” and that was the image he wanted to remember. The funeral took place in the dining room at Princes Gate, and ended at the Brompton Cemetery, where Juliet was buried next to her second son.
In New York, Pierpont described himself to a family friend as “very much upset” by this news, and “incapable of doing anything very satisfactorily.” Juliet had decided near the end of her life to honor her father with a stained-glass window in Boston’s Hollis Street Church. John Pierpont had never forgiven the Hollis Street officials for forcing him out in their bitter Seven Years War, and probably would not have wanted his memorial embedded in those particular walls. Nonetheless, Pierpont Morgan completed his mother’s commission that March, dictating the inscription: “To the glory of God: and in memory of the Revd John Pierpont. Born Litchfield, Conn., April 6, 1785. Died Medford, Mass. ( ). Minister of this church from ( ) to ( ). Erected by his daughter, Juliet Pierpont Morgan.” Someone else filled in the dates.
When Pierpont took Louisa to London a few weeks later, the background of his life had changed. Juliet’s existence had been an insoluble problem for everyone, not least for Juliet herself, and though her husband and children had given up trying to help her, she had always simply been there—ailing, demanding, aggrieved. Now she was gone. What affection her son once bore her had long since turned to pity, and his grief, like his father’s, was for someone he had known in the distant past.
Junius had been careful while Juliet lived to see Alice Mason mainly outside London—on the Mediterranean cruise, in Paris and Rome, at Dover House with other guests. As a widower, however, he could spend time with her freely, and London began to gossip. Louisa was appalled at hearing rumors about “Grandpa and Mrs. Mason” that spring, and rose indignantly to his defense. It seemed “disgusting that a man of 71 can not have a friend without its making this kind of talk,” she declared to her mother. “Especially when his wife has not been dead two months.… It makes me sick.” Still, Louisa did not like Alice Mason, who was coming for dinner that night: “I don’t know how I can be civil to her. From what I hear it is the way she speaks that has made most of the talk.” Alice probably assumed a tone of intimacy with Junius that suggested they were lovers. “She would probably like nothing better,” continued Louisa. “Nasty thing. Cousin Lucy told Papa about it.” Her “Papa” had known about it for years.
* Anson Greene Phelps (1781–1853), a New York merchant specializing in the iron and copper trade, had founded Phelps, Dodge, & Co. in 1832 with his sons-in-law, William Earl Dodge and James B. Stokes. He built the Madison Avenue houses in 1852 for himself and his children, but died before the work was completed. The northernmost brownstone, No. 229 Madison, belonged to the Stokes family, the one in the middle (No. 225) to the Dodges, and No. 219 to Isaac Newton Phelps. The families shared a stable that ran behind all three lots.
† Pierpont patiently ignored the vicissitudes of the market. He told Junius in March 1880 that “we did not expect a quick turn when we commenced—and we have no reason to be disappointed at the result so far.” A month later he advised George Bliss not to sell shares, since the price was likely to go higher. By June, Drexel, Morgan showed a net profit of $12 a share, and J. S. Morgan & Co. had earned $514,000 on its 41,300 shares. Four years later, when S. Endicott Peabody asked about New York Central during a panic, Pierpont demurred—“I never advise anybody to buy stocks”—but he indirectly gave the advice requested: “I, myself, would much rather buy than sell.” At the end of 1885, when a competitive struggle with the Pennsylvania drove the New York Central stock price down to $90, the London bank’s holdings showed a paper loss of over $11 million, and the Morgans stepped in. (See Chapter 13.)
‡ Alice sat for Sargent in Paris early in 1885, and her portrait was shown that summer at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. Violet Paget, a friend of Sargent’s who wrote novels and essays under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, told her mother in July that ever since Sargent’s unflattering portrait of Madame Virginie Gautreau (a picture later known as Madame X), “women are afraid of him lest he should make them too eccentric-looking. A certain Mrs. Mason, an ex-beauty, has got up quite a storm against him” over her portrait, “which I think very dignified & beautiful.” Alice thought it made her look “like a murderess,” and stored it unceremoniously in an attic.
§ He was apparently not related to the future Prime Minister. After Isabella’s marriage, Henry James found Alice “intrinsically as attractive as ever” but “less interesting since she has become a kind of appendage or satellite to a little Scotch squirearchy. She seems immensely fond of young Balfour, who strikes one as an ordinary youth; and it is hard to interest one’s self in her daughter, who, though sweet and maidenly, is unfinished and uncultivated. In this respect she resembles Mrs. Mason herself, who is redolent of American civilization. In no other country could such beautiful material have remained so unwrought.”
‖ In July of 1882, a few months after the Morgan visit, British troops landed at Alexandria and Suez, defeated the nationalist rebels, turned Egypt into a British protectorate, and occupied the country until 1922. The resident British administrator of Egypt from 1882 to 1907 was Evelyn Baring (later the Earl of Cromer—known as “Over-Baring”), who installed British officials in virtually every branch of the Egyptian government, enforced a stringent reorganization of the economy, and ensured regular payment of interest to foreign holders of Egyptian bonds.
Chapter 12
“THE GILDED AGE”
The tumultuous final third of the nineteenth century has generated more divergent interpretations than any other period in American history. It has been written about as The Gilded Age, The Age of Innocence, The Age of Excess, The Age of Reform, The Age of Energy, The Age of Enterprise, The Mauve Decade, The Brown Decades, The Populist Moment, The Confident Years, The American Renaissance, No Place of Grace—and its most conspicuous figures have been characterized as The Robber Barons, The Lords of Creation, and The Vital Few. Much of the dissension about it, at the time and since, has had to do with money.
U.S. national wealth rose from $30 billion in 1870 to nearly $127 billion by 1900, and the size of individual private fortunes soared. William Henry Vanderbilt inherited $70 million when his father died in 1877, and more than doubled that sum in seven years—largely by selling his New York Central stock—leaving $200 million at his own death in 1885. John D. Rockefeller by 1892 had a net worth estimated at more than $800 million (roughly $12 billion in 1990s dollars).
A magazine article on “The Owners of the United States,” published in 1889, claimed that the average annual income of the country’s hundred wealthiest men was between $1.2 million and $1.5 million—dwarfing the incomes of European royalty—while 80 pe
rcent of U.S. families earned less than $500 a year. Few of the new millionaires came from New England, none from the South: the huge fortunes of the late nineteenth century were made in railroads, industry, and finance, in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and the West. According to the author of the article, attorney Thomas G. Shearman,* the Americans worth more than $100 million by 1889 included John D. Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, Jay Gould, and the California railroad magnate Leland Stanford. Among those with over $30 million were various Astors, Russell Sage, P. D. Armour, Henry Flagler, William Rockefeller, Collis P. Huntington, Darius Ogden Mills, Claus Spreckels, and August Belmont—for some reason Shearman did not include Carnegie. At the low end of the list, with $20 million to $30 million, were Marshall Field, Oliver Hazard Payne, H. O. Havemeyer, Anthony Drexel, and Junius and Pierpont Morgan. Shearman estimated the two Morgans’ and Tony Drexel’s net worth at $25 million each, which was high: Junius and Pierpont together were probably worth about $30 million in 1889.
This tremendous concentration of private affluence had powerfully unsettling effects not only on the vast majority of Americans who were not rich but also on the nation’s Old Guard elites. Boston’s Brahmins, New York’s Knickerbockers, and the residents of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square still had ample bank accounts and distinguished lineage, but power, and wealth in previously unimaginable amounts, now belonged to “new” men. Henry Adams regarded the inexorable advance of capitalists, bankers, “goldbugs,” and Jews (he used the terms interchangeably) with a scorn fueled by his own sense of eclipse. A character in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence complained that with the country in the hands of crass political bosses and unwashed immigrants, “decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.”
