by Jean Strouse
Pierpont had for years been closest to his middle sister, Mary, and her husband, Walter Burns—the only family banker he wanted to work with besides Junius. Mary and Walter shared his worldliness and epicurean tastes. They had begun to collect art, and kept an apartment on the Champs Élysées after Burns joined J. S. Morgan & Co. In England they bought a country estate called Copt Hall in Essex, and two neoclassical houses (which they combined into one), No. 69-71 Brook Street, on Grosvenor Square.‡
The Burnses had the best marriage in the Morgan family. Jack, struck by their companionable intimacy when he visited England one summer, implicitly compared it with what he saw at home: his aunt and uncle seemed “so united and at one in their ways,” he told Fanny, “that it gives one a very pleasant impression of the ménage.”
In the ménage at 219, midlife had expanded Fanny’s already substantial frame: her adoring son applauded by mail when he heard that she had been “gaining pounds and pounds”—“I know you won’t like me to say it, but you know yourself that you are always better in health when you weigh between 180 and 190.” Junius, who had made his own accommodation to an empty marriage, left no comment on Pierpont’s preference for keeping the Atlantic between himself and his wife. When Fanny and all three girls went to Europe for six months one year, with a paid companion and one of Fanny’s nieces, Junius worried only that his son would be lonely in New York, and wondered why he had not kept Louisa at home.
If Pierpont was finding romance outside his marriage, there is no evidence for it until the 1890s. He spent most of his leisure time in the eighties with friends such as the Bowdoins, Eglestons, and Laniers, and played an increasingly prominent role in the cultural life of New York.
He had been a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History ever since its founding in 1869. Board members made up the institution’s deficit—often $50,000 a year—and Morgan led fund-raising efforts even when he could not attend meetings. Museum president Morris K. Jesup would announce to the other trustees, “Mr. Morgan has pledged ten thousand dollars. I will give ten thousand dollars. Mr. Iselin, will you give five? Mr. Mills? Mr. Pyne?”
In the forty-four years of his connection with the Natural History Museum, Morgan served as treasurer, vice president, and finance-committee chairman. He donated collections of minerals, gems, meteorites, amber, books, prehistoric South American relics, American Indian costumes, fossil vertebrates, skeletons, and the mummy of a pre-Columbian miner preserved in copper salts. Sending Jesup a check in 1890 for $15,000 to help purchase a gem collection assembled by Tiffany & Co. for the World’s Fair Exhibition in Paris, he did not want public acknowledgment: “The less said the better to my taste.”
He may have encouraged his nephew (through Memie) Henry Fairfield Osborn to join the museum’s staff in 1890. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Osborn had developed an interest in paleontology and, after graduating in 1877, organized expeditions to study fossils in the American West. He did graduate work at Princeton, Columbia, and in England, where he worked under T. H. Huxley and F. M. Balfour—and met Charles Darwin. Earning an ScD from Princeton in 1880, he taught comparative anatomy there until 1890, when he moved to New York to head Columbia’s new Biology Department and serve as curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum. A few years later he wrote of the “rare opportunity” offered by the museum’s “liberal endowments for western exploration, and for the preparation of vertebrate fossils on a large scale”: its collection was already “one of the finest” in the world. In 1908, with the support of his “Uncle Pierpont,” Osborn became president of the museum.
Competition among New York’s young cultural institutions for essential donors and dollars was well under way by the 1880s, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted a Morgan on its board. Junius in 1887 gave the Met Joshua Reynolds’s large group portrait of The Honorable Henry Fane with His Guardians, Inigo Jones and Charles Blair, which he had bought from the twelfth Earl of Westmorland for £13,500 (about $66,000). Henry Fane was the second son of the eighth Earl, who may have commissioned the painting—in which Inigo Jones, a relative of the seventeenth-century architect, looks somewhat like the young Pierpont Morgan.
With this transatlantic gift, Junius joined a few other wealthy Americans who were beginning in the late eighties to move from building private residential “museums” to endowing public institutions. Two of the most famous paintings in America at the time—Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier’s Friedland, 1807 and Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair—were also given to the Met in 1887.§ Henry G. Marquand, appointed president of the museum in 1889, donated thirty-seven Old Master paintings, including works by Vermeer, Van Dyck, and Frans Hals.
Junius’s son had little to do with the Met in the 1880s—he was more involved with the Museum of Natural History across the park—but in 1888 the art museum’s director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, asked him to become a trustee. Since the Met could not elect anyone who served on the Natural History board, Cesnola tried to persuade Pierpont to switch his allegiance: “Your taste has always decidedly been in matters pertaining to our museum,” he argued. “You have, I know, excellent art collections, and fine paintings.… I know too that your excellent father would be very glad to learn that you have taken an active interest in this institution which is progressing at the rate of a thousand to one compared with the other Museum.”
When Pierpont, who had stronger loyalties and more catholic interests than Cesnola knew, replied that it would be impossible for him to resign from the “other” museum’s board (“I have been connected with that Institution from the beginning”), the Met bent its rules and elected him anyway. He remained closely involved with both museums for the rest of his life.
The institution that had first claim on his attention in the eighties, however, was the Episcopal Church. Morgan was treasurer and senior warden at St. George’s, and played an active role in national church affairs as well, attending the triennial General Convention as a lay delegate for the first time in 1886. The Church was governed by a House of Bishops and a House of Deputies, the latter made up of four clerical and four lay delegates from each diocese. In his Hartford youth, Pierpont had followed the proceedings of these conventions and collected autographs of the bishops. As an adult, he attended the conventions and collected the bishops.
In July of 1886 he wrote to his old friend John Crerar in Chicago that he would be spending much of October in that city at the General Convention with a party of friends, and wanted “the best [hotel] accommodation that can be had”—a large parlor with six or eight bedrooms, as “there will be quite a number of ladies in the party, as well as Bishops.” Crerar booked them into the Grand Pacific Hotel. Morgan quietly prepaid the bills.
Although he could not spare half an hour in Boston for his son, he set aside all obligations for three weeks every three years to sit among rectors and bishops, listening to dry ecclesiastical debates. Rainsford thought it was the “very archaic element” of this aspect of church life, “its atmosphere of complete withdrawal from common every day affairs of men,” that answered “some need of [Morgan’s] soul”—and that associating with the guardians of a “beautiful and venerable” religious tradition “had for him an attraction stronger than any other gathering afforded.”
Unlike the intellectuals, from Jack’s Harvard professors to William Morris and John Ruskin, who feared that industrialization was undermining spiritual values, Morgan saw no conflict between the moral and the material world, and apparently neither did his friends in the clergy. He transported parties of “ladies, as well as bishops” to Episcopal conventions in private railroad cars, putting them up for weeks at hotels or rented houses, much the way other millionaires treated friends to the horse races at Saratoga.
His religious life was not an attempt to justify or atone for his wealth, since he did not think he had anything to atone for. He regarded himself as doing honorable public service on Wall Street, and if the disintegration of his marriage troubled hi
m on moral grounds, he left no indication of it. His sense of sin was abstract: Dr. Tyng had assured him in 1861 that to “come with a deep sense of your own guilt” and trust in Christ promised “entire forgiveness.”
As late-nineteenth-century rationalists turned to science and history to fill the place once taken by religion, Morgan acknowledged no challenge to the authority of the Church. Its rituals gave form to his powerful, inchoate sentiments, and its worship of what Henry Adams called “silent and infinite force … the highest energy ever known to man” gave traditional context to his experience.
If the Church met private needs of his soul, he supplied many of its practical necessities. He was appointed in 1886 to a committee responsible for revising the Book of Common Prayer, which he knew practically by heart. He bought rare early editions of the prayer book for the committee, had 500 copies of the revised volume privately printed for the members of the 1892 Convention, and ordered another 250 bound in vellum for each American diocese and libraries in England and the United States. When the Convention met at St. George’s in New York in 1889, he played secular host, arranging for the delegates’ meals, housing, and entertainment. The mediator of railroad wars also arbitrated among factions in the councils of Church conventions, serving as unofficial broker of ecclesiastical peace.
Among the many individual clergymen he supported was Henry Codman Potter, appointed diocesan bishop of New York in 1887. Morgan privately supplemented Potter’s salary with $12,500 a year, and raised $50,000 to insure him an income for the future. An immensely popular figure in Manhattan society, known as “pastor to the 400,” the Right Reverend Potter was the son of a bishop (Alonzo Potter of Pennsylvania), and the nephew of another (Horatio Potter, his predecessor in New York, who had presided over Morgan’s confirmation in 1861). He was also a social reformer who opposed child labor and sweatshops, and issued a pastoral letter objecting to workers being treated like commodities “to be bought and sold as the market shall decree.” In 1887 Potter joined a Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor, which the unions welcomed. Once again, Morgan was subsidizing a clergyman who sided with labor against what Rainsford called the “tyranny of wealth.”
Henry Potter’s uncle, Horatio, had hoped to build an Episcopal cathedral in New York, and Morgan joined a board to raise funds for the project in 1886. “Oh that we had cathedrals in America,” Nathaniel Hawthorne once sighed in a notebook, “were it only for the sensuous luxury.” After the elder Potter’s death, his nephew reconceived the cathedral as an American Westminster Abbey—an ecumenical Protestant house of worship for the city and the nation, to be called St. John the Divine. Morgan thanked Cornelius Vanderbilt for contributing $100,000 in January 1888, and gave hundreds of thousands himself over the next twenty-five years—$500,000 in 1892 alone. In 1887 the diocese and trustees chose a site on the rocky escarpment of Morningside Heights, far north of the populated city, although Rainsford wanted a more convenient location downtown. Columbia College, then on 49th Street between Madison and Park, purchased neighboring property at 116th Street in 1892, with the help of $100,000 from Pierpont Morgan.
Morgan also helped run the cathedral’s architectural competition. Sixty-six firms submitted plans, including McKim, Mead & White, Carrère & Hastings, Richard Morris Hunt, Richard Upjohn, Peabody & Stearns, and Renwick, Aspinwall & Russell. The range of styles in these proposals reflected the ravenous eclecticism of the late Gilded Age, with references to everything from English Gothic to Egyptian pharaonic. The monumental size featured in most of the plans prompted a visiting English architect to wonder whether religious sentiment or “a craving for a tall cathedral by a people of everyday tall ideas, was the underlying motif in this undertaking.” The commission went to George Louis Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge, both trained by America’s great proponent of the neo-Romanesque, Henry Hobson Richardson. Heins & LaFarge proposed to follow the Byzantine models of St. Mark’s in Venice or St. Front in Périgeux for the interior, and to give the exterior the Gothic verticality of the Church of England. Construction began at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street in December 1892. Over a hundred years later it is still under way.
In another effort to bring “new blood” into the enclaves of patrician privilege, Morgan nominated John King, the president of the Erie Railroad, for membership in New York’s exclusive Union Club in 1889. The club’s governors rejected King, “owing to some unknown spite,” Morgan reported to Levi Morton. One chronicler of the tale blamed King’s table manners, and quoted Anatole France: “Il est plus malaisé de manger comme un gentilhomme que de parler comme lui” (it is harder to eat like a gentleman than to talk like one).
Unconcerned by King’s table manners—and further annoyed at the blackballing of his friends Austin Corbin and William Seward Webb—Morgan organized a hundred Union members to walk out in protest, and commissioned Stanford White to build a new club. He is said to have told the architect, “Build a club fit for gentlemen. Damn the expense!”
At their first meeting, the Union secessionists elected Morgan president of the new club. Other founding members were Levi Morton (now Vice President of the United States), Charles Lanier, William C. Whitney, Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt, W. Watts Sherman (son of Pierpont’s first employer), James A. Roosevelt (uncle of Theodore, Jr.), Odgen and Robert Goelet, George Peabody Wetmore, and Adrian Iselin. The press dubbed it the Millionaire’s Club. The founders named it the Metropolitan Club, and paid $480,000 for a site on Fifth Avenue at 60th Street. By the time Stanford White finished the palatial colonnaded Italian Renaissance clubhouse in 1894, it had cost nearly $2 million. On opening day, Morgan and White greeted members at the grand courtyard entrance on 60th Street. The club’s soaring central hall had stained-glass windows, marble walls, scarlet carpets, velvet ropes, a coffered ceiling, and a spectacular double staircase leading to a second-story loggia. Someone said the gilded letter “M,” set into plaques on the staircases’ forged-iron balustrades, stood for Morgan.
John King, Austin Corbin, and W. Seward Webb joined the Metropolitan, but the new club rejected its founding patron’s rector. Rainsford was proposed for membership early in 1894, but withdrew his name once it became clear that he would be blackballed—apparently (shades of John Pierpont) for “the extreme frankness of [his] utterances on certain social and economic questions.”
Morgan helped build not only monuments to high culture, Anglican religion, and masculine privilege, but also an enormous facility for popular entertainment in New York. When a syndicate set up by the National Horse Show Association bought an arena at Madison Avenue and 26th Street in 1887—originally Commodore Vanderbilt’s train sheds, converted to a concert garden by P. T. Barnum in 1873—Morgan took the largest block of shares, and became president of the corporation that would erect Madison Square Garden. Other shareholders included Andrew Carnegie and Stanford White. As it became clear that the economics of the space required more than equestrian usage, the Garden developed into a multi-use pleasure palace with restaurants, theaters, recreations of Shakespeare’s house, the Globe Theatre, Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, and an amphitheater for horse, dog, and flower shows.
The Spanish-Renaissance fantasia designed by Stanford White and completed in 1890 took up an entire city block. It was mostly brick with white terra-cotta trim, Roman colonnades, tall arched windows, eight domed belvederes, and a 341-foot tower inspired by the Giralda on the Spanish cathedral at Seville. At the top of the tower, White placed an eighteen-foot copper statue of Diana with a bow and arrow by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; when the tower opened in November 1891, searchlights revealed a gloriously naked Diana against the evening sky.‖ The New York Daily Graphic pronounced the Garden “unrivalled … a permanent ornament to the city,” and another trade journal called it a “masterpiece” that had no parallel in the United States. The capitalists who had brought about this “architectural triumph” did not see much return on their investment. Three years after the Garden opened, th
e corporation had paid no dividend, and its organizers considered putting the building up for sale. Instead, they rented the amphitheater to the tenant they originally had in mind, the wealthy Horse Show Association, for five years.
Junius’s old friend Sir John Rose collapsed and died while stalking deer in Scotland in August 1888. Alexander Duncan, Pierpont’s first employer, died in his sleep in October of 1889. Perhaps prompted by these events, Junius that fall revised his will. He also renewed the five-year partnership agreement he had drawn up in 1884, specifying that he would leave £1.5 million of capital in J. S. Morgan & Co. if his son chose to continue the business after his own death.
In November, Junius went to Monte Carlo with Alice Mason. Pierpont sent him Cragston apples for Christmas. The guests at the Villa Henrietta early that winter included Fabbris, Grenfells, Cunards, Whartons, Drexels, Roosevelts, and Duncans. At the beginning of March, Junius extended the lease on the house until 1898. An old friend wrote: “I heard that your son was such a wonderful businessman he was thought to be worth one hundred millions of dollars. That is the story in New York.”
At the beginning of April 1890, Pierpont, who was not yet worth anywhere near $100 million, sailed with Louisa on the White Star’s Teutonic to join his father as usual for their birthdays: he was about to turn fifty-three, Junius seventy-seven. Suffering from eczema and gout, he planned to go on after Monte Carlo to take the waters at Aix-les-Bains. He was on the Atlantic in early April when Junius set out one afternoon for Beaulieu in a light, four-wheeled victoria. A train passing along the route startled the horses into a run. No one saw exactly what happened next—the driver was facing forward—but Junius, probably standing up to look, fell out of the carriage and hit his head on a stone wall. When the driver finally stopped the horses 150 yards down the road, he looked around to see the coach empty, and drove back to find his employer lying by the wall, unconscious. Two strangers helped him lift the inert body into the carriage.
