by Jean Strouse
Fanny wrote in her diary that night: “All seem so well and bright! JPM especially.” The next day the entire party went on to Scotland, stopping at Birnam, north of Perth. “JPM” spent most of his time walking and driving with Edith. “After lunch P., who felt very down and cross, walked off with Mrs. Randolph,” recorded Fanny. “After dinner all but Juliet & I walked to Birnam Falls.…” The pattern continued all week: “Others all to Crieff – I stayed quietly here, wrote, drove with the 2 Randolph children, dined alone.… P. drove with Mrs. R. and I with the girls to the Rumbling Bridge.”
After a circuit of Scotland that took in castles, monasteries, villages, and lakes, the Randolphs left for Nottingham. The next day Fanny noted, “Pierpont slept all evening.” Two days after that he went to London.
At some point that summer—perhaps on this trip to London—Pierpont found the letters he had written to his father twice a week, every week, for over thirty years. Junius had carefully preserved them in bound volumes, arranged in chronological order. They constituted an invaluable record of the two men’s professional and personal lives. Too personal for anyone else to see, Pierpont apparently concluded. He burned them.
On August 18, the Morgans and Randolphs met again at Liverpool to sail home on the White Star’s Majestic. Fanny found her stateroom “luxurious.” Pierpont’s was on another deck.
Perhaps Fanny was not worried about “P. and Mrs. R.” that summer because she knew the gossip about Mrs. R. and another man—former Navy Secretary William C. Whitney. Now in the street railway business, this tall, good-looking, politically ambitious Democrat was married to the former Flora Payne, heiress to a Standard Oil fortune. During Whitney’s four-year tenure at the Navy (1884–88), Flora was said to have received sixty thousand guests at their Georgetown mansion. Her husband tolerated her large social ambitions but preferred quieter forms of recreation, and often stayed in town while Flora joined the fashionable crowd at Lenox, Bar Harbor, and Newport.
The gossip column in Town Topics, which was as avidly read by haute New York as it was disavowed, had announced in April 1890—just after Junius died—that Edith Randolph was engaged to Flora Whitney’s wealthy brother, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne. A few weeks later the anonymous columnist retracted this erroneous news and came up with a racier assertion: since the widow, the colonel, and the Whitneys were “very much together now,” the only possible inference was that “Col. Payne is playing the part of gooseberry” for his sister’s husband. “As for Mrs. Randolph,” concluded the writer—referring to her new St. George’s affiliation, and dropping a risqué hint—“I understand that she has of late become a religious devotée, which does not, however, interfere to any great extent with her passion for horseback riding, to which exercise Mrs. Whitney is also devoted.” Flora Whitney had no aptitude for riding.
The Whitneys went to Europe in the early summer of 1890, at the same time as the Morgans and Randolphs. Edith traveled with them in June while Pierpont took the cure at Aix. Mr. Whitney took daylong excursions alone with the handsome widow (just as Morgan would in England two weeks later), complaining that his wife’s temper drove him away. Flora claimed she was cross because of her husband’s attentions to Mrs. Randolph. When Edith rejoined the Morgans in July, Whitney left for New York. He told his wife: “you have done [Mrs. Randolph] a great injury. Scandal wags its tongue at every pretty woman almost … and your manner and words have injured her. She was companionable, and bright spirited and I enjoyed her socially. Why shouldn’t I?” He insisted that “nothing of what you thought happens to be true.”
Fanny Morgan made no such fuss that summer, and forced her husband to no explanation or denial, although she noted in her diary that one of her children (probably Anne) complained: “You constantly ask me to decide between Papa and you.”
In May of 1890, shortly before he left for Europe with Edith, Pierpont ordered a new yacht. His fortune had more than doubled after his father’s death, and his pleasure in Corsair had exceeded his high expectations. Yachting was now the Gilded Age’s premier form of sport. There had been twenty-nine boats in the New York Yacht Club fleet when Morgan acquired Corsair in 1882; eight years later there were seventy-one, their increasing opulence and size measuring the rise in their owners’ means.
Morgan invited a young yacht designer named J. Frederic Tams to his office, and announced that he was thinking of building a new Corsair: would Mr. Tams take on the job? Tams, who wrote an account of this interview years later, was nonplussed; he had no experience with such a large assignment, and wanted a few days to think it over.
Morgan had thought it over. “What are you doing tonight?” he asked. “Can’t you come to dinner and let me know then? I am sailing in a few days to be away some time and want her to be ready by the time I get back.”
Amused and impressed by the banker’s dispatch with a matter of this magnitude, Tams considered the proposition for a few hours, and agreed over dinner at 219 to accept.
What, he asked, did Mr. Morgan have in mind as to materials, size, speed, interior decor?
“I have no time to think about all that”—Morgan waved the question away. He simply needed a bigger yacht—though not too large to turn around in the Hudson at Highland Falls—as much like the existing Corsair as possible.
Tams, having sailed on Corsair, said he thought it would be a mistake to reproduce her, as she was slow, dark belowdecks, and not very good at sea. He had not counted on his host’s proprietary pride. “I shall never forget the expression that came over his face,” Tams recalled. “He looked at me for some appreciable moments with those eyes of his and I suddenly became aghast at my temerity. I thought he might explode or order me out of the room.”
Morgan looked away, perhaps weighing the prospect of a more advanced, better-designed yacht against the insult to the old one, and then, “turning back, said in the gentlest sort of voice, ‘You are right; go ahead on that basis.’ ”
A few days later Tams returned to 23 Wall Street to work out details. Who would handle the payments while Morgan traveled? he wanted to know. The banker rang a bell on his desk and asked a clerk to bring him a Drexel, Morgan checkbook. When it arrived, he handed it across the mahogany desk.
Who should sign? Tams inquired.
Morgan: “Don’t you know how to draw and sign checks?”
Tams: “Yes.”
“Well, you draw until you are stopped.”
As he had with Rainsford, Fabbri, Coster, Stetson, and Edison, Morgan chose a man whose skills had impressed him, and gave him the means to do an expert’s job. He would not interfere unless things went wrong.
Though he wanted the new yacht ready by the time he returned from Europe, the process of building her took a year and a half. The hull and engines were designed by John Beavor-Webb, an Irish-born engineer who had built two of England’s America’s Cup contenders, and had recently married Alice May, one of Edith Randolph’s sisters. Tams, supervising the project, designed the interior and fittings. The new steam yacht Corsair—241 feet in length, weighing 560 tons, with single screw, triple-expansion engines, 2,000 horsepower, wide wooden decks, striped awnings, two masts, auxiliary sails, a gilt clipper bow, black hull, and a gracefully sweeping sheer—was ready for use in the fall of 1891. The hull of the first Corsair, built in 1880, had been made of iron. The second, in 1891, was steel.
Jack accompanied his father on an inaugural sail to Cragston early that October. Forward, the second Corsair had two staterooms, a bath, and a large dining saloon with oak paneling and banquettes upholstered in dark green plush. There were six more staterooms aft, including Morgan’s, each with its own bath. Tams had “thought things out and arranged details as I thought only a woman could do,” reported Jack to his traveling mother. There were “little places to put your watch at night,” sponge hooks in the bathrooms, real fireplaces, wardrobes in every room, full sets of “Corsair” china, glass, silver, and linen, a storage room for trunks, and steam heat.
“Y
ou cannot imagine anything more splendid in the way of construction, or tasteful in decoration,” Jack concluded. His father was “delighted”—“I never saw him express such entire satisfaction with anything before. He went so far as to declare that there was nothing which he wished changed in any way.”
No one stopped Mr. Tams from writing checks. Morgan didn’t have to ask. He sold his first yacht for $70,000 once the second was built. His private “Corsair” accounts in the nineties ran well over $100,000 a year.
On personal items as well as yachts, Morgan remained exigent about quality and detail. He ran a steady tab with the Savile Row tailor Henry Poole & Co., clothiers to the courts of England and France, and when a shipment of dishes he bought in London reached New York, he complained that it included eighteen salad plates, “about the ugliest things I ever saw and certainly none that I ever ordered.”
One unwelcome task that had come with his inheritance was managing the finances of his sister Juliet. He told her at the end of 1891 that he would not increase her income above $40,000 a year: “on the scale that you live it is absolutely impossible for you to wisely expend any more,” although he would take up emergencies as they arose. Judging by his own considerably greater expenses, he went on, and by the amount he gave Fanny for hers, he could not understand Juliet’s having any trouble managing on $40,000 (roughly equivalent to $600,000 in the 1990s). Furthermore, her husband was “quite able to pay a portion of the house expenses, & it is proper that he should do so.”
He himself was giving away more than Juliet’s annual income. At the end of 1891 he sent Connecticut’s Bishop Williams a case of whiskey and a check for $2,000, to be used “for your own personal comfort in any way—with my dear love,” and donated $30,000 to Yale’s Divinity School for a Bishop Williams Scholarship Fund. When the New York Botanical Garden, founded in the spring of 1891 on East Fordham Road in the Bronx, could not procure city funding until private sources had been tapped, Morgan joined Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie to produce ten subscriptions for $25,000 each, including their own.
He was also expanding his collections of books and manuscripts, though with no clear plan or direction. Junius had given him Sir Walter Scott’s manuscript of Guy Mannering in 1881. Ten years later, long before it became popular to collect Victorian fiction, Pierpont bought some of the most important authors’ manuscripts of the period—Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right and Wilkie Collins’s mysteries, The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Guy Mannering served as the cornerstone for this collection, and Morgan eventually acquired fifteen more Scott manuscripts.
He worked primarily through two London book dealers in the early nineties—J. Pearson & Co. and Henry Sotheran & Co. F. W. Wheeler at Pearson sent him lists of items for consideration: Morgan crossed some out, ordered others, and complained (with regard to a Wilkie Collins MS) “price altogether too high,” and (a Byron) “don’t want at any such price.” He also bought printed books, among them James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, John Lothrop Motley’s Correspondence, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Kipling’s Light that Failed, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, several sets of Scott’s novels, Thomas Gray’s poems, biographies of Dickens, Wellington, Constable, Gainsborough, and Fanny Burney, and a volume called Love & Marriages of Distinguished Men.
The dealers catered to his interest in literary first editions, armorial bindings, Bibles, liturgies, royal signatures, and collections of documents relating to eighteenth-century historical events, such as the “Junius Letters,”* the trial of Warren Hastings, and the repeal of the Stamp Act. In the early nineties he purchased a collection of letters by the Kings and Queens of England from the time of Richard III, as well as a bound series of more recent date containing a wisp of the Duke of Wellington’s hair and a note from the rakish Edward Albert, Prince of Wales, with a suggestive postscript: “My dear Francis … How did you find the lady in Chester Street?”
Morgan rarely said anything about what he purchased or why, although writing in 1892 to a man from whom he bought a second set of autographs by the signers of the Declaration of Independence—an enormously popular genre among collectors of Americana, and this set was exceptionally fine—he suggested that he had something other than private possession ultimately in mind: “I must certainly congratulate you upon the condition in which I find [the collection], as well as its character,” he wrote, “and I trust it will give great pleasure to me, as well as to those who in after years may enjoy it.” He later gave a third set to the Library of Congress.
While Morgan was assembling great works of world literature on his library shelves, for pleasure he read minor Victorian novels—the literary equivalent of his narrative salon paintings. According to Louisa, his favorites were Geraldine Hawthorne (whose anonymous author, Beatrice May Butt, specialized in tales of women in romantic distress); Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton’s four-volume survey of English provincial life, My Novel; Mary Cholmondeley’s Sir Charles Danvers, an entertaining romance that follows a pair of aristocratic lovers through secret yearnings, missed opportunities, noble renunciations, and high heroics to a happy end; and a little antisocialist tract and love story called Fraternity, A Romance of Inspiration, published anonymously in 1888 by a Miss M. M. Holland Thomas.
Morgan read Fraternity when it first appeared, gave copies to friends, and arranged to meet the author in London. Set mainly in Wales, the novel portrays a young Oxford graduate named Edmund Haig, orphaned and raised by priests, who devotes his life to teaching the children of the poor. He falls in love with a local girl named Blodwen in the tiny Welsh town of Llanfairydd, but can’t marry her because he has no money. Forcing himself to give up personal happiness, he sets off to spread the gospel of Christian fraternity to the world.
Edmund believes that the French Revolution went wrong in stressing liberty and equality over fraternity, and tells Welsh miners to renounce their demands for better wages and working conditions in favor of brotherly love and hard work. Edmund “was a strange kind of Socialist,” notes Miss Thomas, “devoid of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. He was a fraternal Socialist, the only right kind.” Stepping out of her story, the author mounts a soapbox: “You, who love the poor, who influence the poor, teach them not that the rich withhold from them their rightful heritage; that they are victims of injustice because they are poor.… We have no more right to be all equally wealthy than we have to be equally healthy.” And she urges: “Come, let us take up poverty cheerfully, young Wales! Is not education open to all, science eternally true, and art forever beautiful?… Is not the sleep of the laboring man sweet?… Love each other … and control of self shall make you equal with the highest gentleman in the world!”
Edmund eventually learns that he is the elder son of a rich man and free to marry Blodwen after all. He tells her that deep inequalities of soul, mind, and moral beauty create more problems than differences in worldly wealth: “And we who are the elder children, so to speak, of the human family—we who are educated, and who are sensitive to the bad habits and disagreeable customs of the ignorant younger children—we must instruct and enlighten, and cheer and refine them till inequality is conquered, through Fraternity and for Fraternity.” Their students will teach other children, and “the day shall come when all the spheres shall move in harmony,” and “to be rich shall no longer be counted man’s chief good.”
Morgan so admired this fairy tale about a benevolent, paternalistic elite refining its “ignorant younger children” until everyone lives happily ever after that he later subsidized its republication. (See Chapter 19.) More surprising than his endorsement of a shallow, patronizing screed on the problems of inequality is that he chose to read about this subject in his spare time.
Jack did not share his father’s enthusiasm for Fraternity. He liked the love story, he told Fanny, but “as for the new Socialism, I cannot get on with it entirely.… It has taken nineteen centuries for one perfect life to change in as much as it has been changed at all, the na
ture of one small part of the world; why expect a purely human system, built on a divine idea but simply human after all, to change that nature in a hurry?”
Pierpont’s youthful sermon to Jim Goodwin from Göttingen on the virtues of wifely domesticity and selflessness had been entirely in the prospective abstract. Thirty years later, his wife was not exactly selfless—she required more attention than anyone seemed able to provide—but as it turned out, he found domesticity stifling, and preferred consorts who did not fit his early ideal of feminine “duty” after all. He was drawn to bright, self-possessed women with a touch of champagne in their veins—women who met him on his own ground, felt at home in the world, shared his social instincts and hedonistic tastes.
At Göttingen he had also pronounced it wonderful that the Drapers continued to like him even after he and Jim had made fools of themselves in Hartford. Women always liked him, even with his forbidding visage—about which, in the right circumstances, he had a sense of humor.
Margot Tennant, who later married H. H. Asquith, met Morgan in the late 1880s, and reported in her diary that he asked her: “What wd you do if you were me with all my riches yet having this terrible nose?” (“He is cursed,” she graphically explained, “with a Cyrano nose of vast blue oozing glands a hideous deformity.”)
She replied, “I sd. not mind so much if I were you as you can never have been very good-looking,” and concluded: “this seems to have pleased him & he tucked me into a cosy corner of his heart & has seen me about a doz. times since.” Twenty-five years later he gave her £3,000 to restore a country house she and her husband were buying near Oxford; in return, she sent him a signed first edition of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
