Morgan

by Jean Strouse

  The government’s major antitrust and regulatory actions of 1906 did not seriously disturb the Morgan bank. When Attorney General Charles Bonaparte brought suit against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Perkins crowed about the wise preventive measures taken at U.S. Steel. And after Congress passed a new bill to regulate railroads—the Hepburn Act, authorizing the ICC to prescribe just and reasonable rates for the future—the bankers once again hoped that federal regulation would impose the stability they had been seeking for decades. Perkins told Morgan in June 1906 that “while the treatment is mighty heroic, it is going to work out for the ultimate and great good of the railroads. There is no question but that rebating has been dealt a death blow.”

  That the ICC did not aggressively attack railroad rates over the next few years disappointed the roads’ opponents, but the Hepburn Act did limit fare increases, which cut into the railroads’ profits, lowered the value of their securities, and restricted their access to capital for improvement, expansion, and equipment.

  The U.S. economic picture had grown darker since Schiff’s prediction in January 1906 that without currency reform there would be “such a panic … as will make all previous panics look like child’s play.” The Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars had absorbed much of the West’s capital reserves. England and Germany raised their interest rates in the fall of 1906, to attract funds. As cash drained out of U.S. markets, the Treasury had no means to expand the money supply.a

  Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson attributed the country’s economic troubles of 1906–7 to the government’s “aggressive attitude toward the railroads, that made it impossible for them to borrow.” Much of the business community agreed, and urged Roosevelt to ease up on regulatory measures and antitrust prosecutions. Instead, TR threatened at the end of 1906 to subject all large trusts to federal control. He declared that Americans were enjoying “a literally unprecedented prosperity.”

  Morgan planned to leave for Europe in mid-March 1907, but the combination of monetary shrinkage and a rumor that Roosevelt would make some dramatic new move against the railroads called him out of his “Up-Town Branch.” He went to Washington on March 12 and spent two hours discussing “the present business situation” with the President. As he left the White House he told the press that Roosevelt would soon meet with the heads of leading railroads to see what might be done to “allay public anxiety.” On March 14, the day after Morgan sailed for Europe, the stock market crashed in spite of record corporate earnings. Prices collapsed, brokerage houses closed, interest rates soared. Roosevelt called off his meeting with the railroad men. The Dow Jones average lost nearly 25 percent of its value, falling from 96 in January to 75 in March. Morgan’s New York partners cabled their London colleagues that the “underlying cause” of the “enormous drop” was impossible to discern.

  An impromptu emergency committee consisting of Harriman, Frick, Schiff, William Rockefeller, and H. H. Rogers called at 23 Wall Street to suggest that the house of Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb organize a pool of $25 million to intervene in the markets and stop further declines. Jack cabled this proposal to his father, but said it might be safer to do nothing: he had heard from George Baker that the Treasury Secretary was about to step in.

  Morgan, concerned in equal measure with propriety and feasibility, urged restraint: “Think plan suggested would be unwise,” he replied from London—“entirely at variance with all policies we have ever adopted being at the head of a declared Stock Exchange manipulation which do not think we are competent undertake.” He could imagine circumstances that “might make it imperative at any cost,” but “so long as parties in Washington have power to checkmate any good we might do the danger is still greater. I feel this is all I can say and must leave you deal with situation. Show this George F. Baker you can have no better counsellor.”

  To help meet the demand for money, Roosevelt’s new Treasury Secretary, George Cortelyou—former Commerce Secretary and Republican Party chairman—deposited $12 million with national banks in New York. At a similar moment in the “Rich Man’s” panic of 1903, Morgan had put together a reserve of $50 million. Now, four years later, his colleagues took his advice against intervening in the market, but the ten largest New York banks pledged $2.5 million each to a new pool in case the crisis grew worse. The Treasury cash and the widely advertised fact of the bankers’ reserve calmed the markets briefly, but throughout that spring stock prices continued to slide, businesses and brokerages to fail, and bank reserves to decline. Wary investors on both sides of the Atlantic sold securities and hoarded gold.

  Morgan celebrated his seventieth birthday at Aix on April 17 with Adelaide and his sister Mary. Jack’s cable for the occasion went a bit far: “As Jesus the Son of Sirach says let us praise famous men and our Fathers that begat us leaders of the people by their counsels and knowledge, rich men furnished with ability living peacably in their habitations, merciful men whose righteousness has not been forgotten. This with loving birthday greetings.”

  From Aix the Morgan party went to Paris and London, then in late May met Roger Fry in Perugia for a tour of Italian art. Fry had continued to work as curator of paintings at the Met, and his estimations of its president continued to fluctuate. In June of 1906 he took Morgan to see Degas’s Le Viol (The Rape) in Paris, for possible acquisition by the museum, and offered a rare firsthand glimpse of “the big man’s” response to modern art. The anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock had just raided the Art Students League in New York and confiscated paintings of nudes. The president of the Met had to take American puritanism into account, although his own instincts before the Degas seemed appreciative. Fry reported: Morgan felt “that, in spite of its beauty, [Le Viol] would be open to objection from the Comstockians, and that we ought not at present to face that particular music.”b

  A year later Fry complained to the Philadelphia collector John G. Johnson that Morgan had just skimmed three paintings for himself from a group of Italian works offered to the Met, “and expressed a pious hope that the Museum might be able to buy the rest! When I think that you [Johnson], who have nothing to do with our Museum, always generously stand aside when we are in for things, I confess this from the President of the Museum surprises me. However he is, I believe, quite friendly with me so that this anecdote had better not get abroad.”

  Fry was counting on Morgan’s friendliness in the spring of 1907. He hoped to change his title at the Met to European adviser on paintings, with no cut in salary, which would leave him free to spend more time abroad, and when Morgan invited him to Perugia to see an exhibition of Umbrian art and tour the region, the critic took it as a good sign: “You may guess from this,” he told his wife, “that Morgan has become very affable to me and seems quite willing that I shall have my own terms with the Museum. As he is omnipotent, that is everything.”

  In Italy, Fry found himself pleasantly surprised by the “affable” potentate’s character and taste. He met Morgan, Adelaide Douglas, and Mary Burns in Perugia on May 27. The next day the group went through the Exhibition, “where [Morgan] was received like royalty without any notice of his coming being given,” Fry wrote to his wife. “It’s quite curious whenever we go to a church there’s a little crowd of young men gathered to watch and at the Exhibition all the chief people come to offer their services. It astounds me that here they should know and feel about him like that. Somehow he has touched the imagination of people as no other millionaire has. He enjoyed himself hugely and really loves to go about to the churches and to see things that he can’t buy, which I like in him. Indeed, I’ve got on wonderfully with him in this mood.”

  From Perugia the travelers motored to Assisi. Fry described their reception as “incredibly comic”: the town was “in a state of frenzied excitement, all the Franciscan monks hoping to get [Morgan] to give them money to buy back their convent, bowing and scraping and opening up their sacredest treasures … poor St. Francis’s marriage with Poverty seemed to have brought forth a strange offspring. But the thin
g was not so crude after all because to my surprise Morgan was deeply impressed by the lower church. Thought Giotto’s Raising of Lazarus the finest picture he had ever seen and generally displayed a kind of intelligence which I hadn’t expected.”

  Bernard Berenson happened also to be at Assisi, and Fry dined with him that evening. “We laughed,” Fry wrote home, “over my position as bear leader to the great man.”

  In Florence a few days later, Morgan bought the autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s last violin sonata (Opus 96 in G Major) from the Florentine rare-book dealer Leo Olschki, and Fry dined with the Berensons at the Villa I Tatti, where the hospitality was mixed with intellectual one-upmanship: “B.B. quite absurd wanting to catch me out over his pictures,” Fry complained. He declined to play the attribution game, pleading fatigue, but his host persisted in trying “to make my ignorance as apparent as he could.”

  Berenson reported to Mrs. Gardner: “Fry burst in upon us … looking dead tired. He had left Morgan for a day or two, Morgan and his Mrs. Douglas, and gave the most interesting account of them.” BB was not impressed: “It seems Morgan’s desire now is to re-value the masterpieces of Italian art. The worst of it is he will succeed. The fact that he liked a picture will probably be remembered for years. Such are people,” sighed the critic/connoisseur. “No critic, no connoisseur affects them … [but] the whole public will go see a picture that Morgan’s nose has corruscated over approvingly. These by the way are my reflections, not Fry’s. Fry really admires Morgan very much—as doubtless should all of us if we only could.”

  Fry’s admiration continued to grow. The party went on to Siena and San Gimignano, then boarded Morgan’s “marvellous yacht greeted from the shore by the whole population of Ancona and its brass band.” From Paris ten days later Fry reported buying “some fine things for the Museum and some superb ones for Morgan. He’s more colossal than ever in his purchases but also much more intelligent. He’s mighty pleased with me.”

  In the sunlight of the “great man’s” pleasure, Fry did manage to change his job at the Met to European adviser on paintings, with no loss of recompense.

  Morgan made other magnificent purchases in the summer of 1907 as well. Through Duveen Brothers he acquired a selection of paintings from the estate of the French collector Rodolphe Kann. He had put up half of the $4.5 million Duveen paid the Kann estate, on condition that he have first choice of about thirty pictures. The paintings he chose included Ghirlandaio’s Giovanna Tornabuoni, Portrait of a Young Man by Andrea del Castagno, a Roger van der Weyden Annunciation, two panels by Memling, and works by Gerard David, van Ruysdael, Metsu, and Terborch—but not, surprisingly, Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.c

  Proceeding to London in June, Morgan spent a weekend at Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire—the country estate he had helped May and Loulou Harcourt restore—with a party that included Edward VII, Alice Keppel, Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Rothschild. He also reviewed page proofs for an illustrated catalogue of his paintings prepared by W. Roberts and T. Humphry Ward, authors of a 1904 catalogue raisonée of the works of Romney.

  By 1907 Morgan had commissioned catalogues for several of his collections. Joseph Sabin had published an inventory of the library at 219 in 1883, and Earl Shinn listed Morgan’s early paintings in the Art Treasures of America in 1879. As the scope of his collecting expanded, Morgan hired specialists to assess and classify what he had acquired, and to present the information in beautifully produced volumes—leatherbound elephant folios with scholarly text and fine color plates, printed on vellum or high-quality paper. Many of his predecessors had published similar registers—Morgan had bought catalogues of the Wallace and Alfred de Rothschild collections from Sotheran in 1902–3, and presented scholarly inventories of the Hoentschel collections to the Met. He gave copies of his own catalogues as they were completed to royal friends in Europe (including Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm), as well as to scholars, dealers, museums, libraries, and universities.

  These volumes at once located Morgan in relation to the objects’ previous owners, and somewhat offset the transitory nature of possession: although he currently owned bronze sculptures, portrait miniatures, the Colonna Raphael, the Grasse Fragonards, and Rembrandt’s Nicolaes Ruts, someone else might acquire them after he died. The catalogues preserved his collections under his name.

  Catalogues also made it possible for people who could not visit the collections to examine the works described. Morgan asked George C. Williamson, who compiled the volumes on his watch, jewel, and portrait miniature collections, to present the illustrations in such a way that students could use them. According to Williamson, when the catalogue of watches was completed, Morgan said, “in some respects, it was more pleasant to see the illustrations than the originals, because, in the former, one could look at every side of the watch … at a glance, whereas the original had to be opened and turned over.”

  The medievalist M. R. James, who had edited the illustrated Chiswick Press volume on the Bennett collection, produced a catalogue of some of Morgan’s medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts in 1906. William Laffan had compiled the catalogue of Chinese porcelains, Albert Clay prepared the volumes on Babylonian tablets, and Wilhelm Bode in Berlin finished two volumes on Morgan’s Renaissance bronzes in 1909. In an introduction, Bode wrote that Morgan—“the greatest collector of our time”—owned “the most comprehensive and probably the most important collection of bronzes to be found in private possession, a collection moreover exceptionally rich in Italian small bronzes of the Renaissance.”

  Bode then sketched a picture of Morgan’s general method: “Beginning to collect bronzes at a time when it was thought that they had almost disappeared from the market, he proceeded upon lines very similar to those which he had followed when forming his collection of books, miniatures, and other objects; first securing certain notable collections en bloc and then gradually adding any good examples which happened to come under his notice. Thus in less than a decade he has succeeded in bringing together a collection superior even to many which have taken a lifetime to form.”

  Roger Fry had described Morgan at the end of their 1907 Italian tour as “mighty pleased with me.” After changing his job at the Met, probably with its president’s blessing, Fry rarely came to New York, and the board ignored most of his recommendations. In June of 1909 he found a Fra Angelico Virgin and Child, from the King of Belgium’s collection, in a Paris gallery, and asked permission to buy it for the museum for £10,000. Board secretary Robert W. de Forest wired back authorization, subject to the approval of Morgan or Laffan, but Morgan in the meantime saw and bought the painting for himself.

  Fry had been outraged before at Morgan’s appropriation of items on offer to the Met. Others at the museum, beholden to its president for major collections and dozens of individual gifts, maintained a discreet silence whenever he bought something out from under them. Not Fry. In 1909 he fired off a letter of reproach. Morgan wrote across the top, probably to de Forest, “This is the most remarkable letter I ever received. I do not propose to answer it until I see you. Bring it back.”d

  Over the next several months, Fry entirely lost the confidence of the Met trustees: asked to come to New York to save his job, he stayed in London and protested his ill treatment. In late December 1909 the Met’s assistant director, Edward Robinson, told Fry that his services had “not been up to expectations” for some time, and let him go. Belle Greene told Berenson early in 1910 that she was “up in the air” about what had actually happened: Fry had done “several inexplicable and erratic things” recently, “but no one seems to know or is willing to tell just what was the last straw.”

  Fry blamed his dismissal on Morgan but continued trying to sell him things—a Persian astronomical treatise, Macauley manuscripts, bronze doors, several paintings, a little bronze “Cellini”—and at the end of 1912 he personally designed the cover for bound copies of a Burlington Magazine series on
Morgan’s Byzantine enamels, sending the issues to New York with a note: “I hope you will think them not unworthy of the splendid objects they treat of.… I was very sorry to hear you had been ill but hope that you are quite recovered, and that I may wish you a very happy New Year.” (At some point between 1905 and 1912, Morgan had bought 1,000 shares of preferred stock in the Burlington for £1 a share. In the inventory of his estate they were listed as having no value.)

  Many years later, Fry wrote an account of the 1907 Italian trip and gave it to Virginia Woolf, who published it in her 1940 biography, Roger Fry. In witty detail Fry told of Morgan “sleeping upstairs in the arms of the elderly and well preserved Mrs. Douglas,” of shady Levantine dealers and provincial Italian aristocrats desperate to sell their wares to “il Morgan,” and of Mary Burns, “Mrs. Douglas’ chaperone,” who was “entirely unnoticeable” except when she “uttered little shrill mouse-like squeaks of admiration at pictures, scenery, or Mr. Morgan’s remarks.”

  In 1907 Fry had been struck by Morgan’s intelligent responses, “huge enjoyment,” appreciation of Giotto, and interest in things he could not buy. In retrospect he said exactly the opposite: “Morgan … didn’t know how bored he was going to be with the frescoes at Assisi where … there was nothing one could buy.… Assisi was a failure. Mr. Morgan was displeased with the condition of the frescoes.… Mrs. Douglas would like to have improved her mind by pumping me on the history of the church and Giotto but we were hurried away since Morgan [was not] enjoying [himself].”