by Jean Strouse
e Sargent had done a portrait of Jack’s wife, Jessie, in the spring of 1905. He asked her to bring a box of dresses to the first sitting so that he could decide what looked best in his studio’s light, and set up a mirror in which she could watch him paint. She found it “thrilling.… He is very agreeable. I had 13 sittings.” As the portrait neared completion, Jack asked Sargent whether, “as you are an American, it might be possible that your pictures could come in to America free of duty.” A few weeks later, the banker urged the artist “to do whatever is necessary at the Consulate to see that the picture comes through free of duty, and I shall be very much obliged to you for all your trouble.” The portrait, for which Jack paid £1,050—about $5,000—is now at the Pierpont Morgan Library.
f Belle, of course, became friends with both men. Steichen loved writing out her name in full, “Belle da Costa Greene, for it sounds great”—which was even more of a compliment than he intended, since she had made some of it up. Stieglitz in 1914 asked her to contribute an essay to a special issue of Camera Work on “291.” He was inviting people to whom it “seems to have meant something very much out of the ordinary,” he explained, “to put down their feelings.… You often gave me to understand that the little place did mean something to you.… I am not looking for any personal adulation. Nor am I desirous of any theorizing. I am primarily after the recording of a few real heart-beats, if there be any heart-beats for the little garret. If you would, in as few words as possible, put down on paper what ‘291’ meant to you I would appreciate it immensely.” The issue (XLVII, July 1914), was published in January 1915, titled “What is 291?” The respondents included Mabel Dodge, Hutchins Hapgood, Djuna Barnes, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Eugene Meyer, Jr., Agnes Meyer, Abraham Walkowitz, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, John Marin, Francis Picabia, and Belle Greene.
g Three years after the Peruvian “Velasquez” finished his portraits of Morgan, they started to melt. He had mixed a tar-based bitumen into his oils, and loaded the paint so thickly on the canvas that it was highly susceptible to heat. In the summer of 1914, a streak of brown from the coat sleeve ran down over the cuff on the copy at the Met, and the whole surface exuded a sticky sweat. Baca-Flor took the canvases back and tried to restore them, but in 1928 Belle, who had long since revised her opinion of the artist, found the Hartford copy in the “same deplorable condition as all the other portraits of the late Mr. Morgan which were executed by the thoroughly unreliable … Baca-Flor.” In 1939 Jack Morgan sent the Met a replica, and asked that the original be destroyed.
h James thought he had invented the name—“the Mantuan”—and was embarrassed to learn in 1912 that there was a sixteenth-century artist, Rinaldo Mantovano, whose works were at the National Gallery: “my Mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy,” he told the friend who pointed out his mistake, “and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out!”
Chapter 31
TRUST AND MONEY
At the beginning of 1912, Morgan had traveled from Paris to Monte Carlo (where Stillman pronounced him “optimistic” but “whistling to keep his courage up”) to Egypt with the Lawrences and Lythgoes. In February, as he cruised the Nile and had the first of his art collections shipped to New York, a congressional subcommittee headed by Louisiana Representative Arsène Pujo began to investigate the “money trust.” The New York lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who helped initiate the inquiry, defined its subject as a “money oligarchy”—a “system, vicious and dangerous beyond conception,” through which a few groups of men in New York controlled the nation’s banks, corporations, railroads, insurance companies, and Stock Exchange. “Within the past five years,” Untermyer declared, “there has been a concentration of this money power greater than that known in the preceding fifty years,” and it was stifling the free play of industrial and financial competition.
The Washington Post urged Congress to “settle once for all the question whether a small group of men control the financial and business destiny of the nation.” The New York Times described the coterie of bankers as “the trust of trusts, without whose favor all other trusts must languish to a lingering death.” The Wall Street Journal, calling the “money trust” simply another name for Morgan, did not see cause for concern: “The condition which has developed in Wall Street in the past fifteen years is to a considerable extent a personal one, and the authority which centers in the hands of Mr. Morgan, a man 75 years of age, is by no means something which can be passed down to his successors. Such men have no successors; and their work is either left undone after they are dead or the world devises other means and other work to take its place.”
Morgan’s partners and attorneys conferred about the investigation all spring. In March, Steele and Jack cabled “Flitch” that it would be “advantageous to general situation testify in general way as to our own affairs, declining answer any questions in regard to our relations with depositors or as to our clients’ interests in syndicates etc.” Handled well, the inquiry might “help dissipate present public apprehension.” Then in April the committee appointed Untermyer its chief counsel, and the House passed a resolution enlarging the investigation’s scope. Jack wired his father in Venice ten days after the sinking of the Titanic that the inquest would probably be as “unpleasant” as possible.
Samuel Untermyer was an experienced trial lawyer and lifelong Democrat who specialized in corporate finance. In the late eighties and nineties, he had made a fortune organizing financial syndicates and industrial consolidations. He raised orchids and bred dogs on his Hudson River Valley estate, and once said that a young lawyer starting out in practice needed $5 million to ensure his independence. Untermyer had also worked in the nineties for the Boss of New York’s Tammany Hall, Richard Croker. Two years after Adolph Ochs took over The New York Times, in 1898, Untermyer called on him with a message from Croker: the Times could have all the city’s advertising if it agreed to hire “a certain well-known newspaper man” for $10,000 a year. Ochs refused the bribe. Early in the new century, Untermyer began to criticize corporate trusts, and gave a series of speeches in 1911 calling for government action to break up or regulate monopolies.
A week after the Pujo Committee appointed Untermyer, Harry Davison met Morgan, Senator Aldrich, and AT&T president Theodore Vail at Aix, and cabled Jack: “most delighted appearance Flitch who in spite of ‘Titanic’ and NY annoyances seems in good spirits and philosophical.” On May 3 he and Morgan wired their New York office that the bank and its associates ought to be represented by “best counsel obtainable,” and also by the best publicist, to see that “correct facts” about the investigation “reach the public in their true and proper light.”
The Morgan bank already had the best available counsel, including Stetson, Ledyard, Joseph Choate, former Wisconsin Senator John C. Spooner, and Richard Lindabury, who was working on the U.S. Steel case. With regard to publicity, Tom Lamont had taken charge. He replied from New York, referring to himself in the third person, that “TWL’s man” C. T. Brainerd, the former manager of a subscription book business in Boston, had just bought the McClure newspaper syndicate from McClure’s successors for $75,000: “Lamont is delighted. Thinks it will eventually prove source of great strength.” Brainerd was already doing “good work” through a journalist named E. J. Edwards, who wrote syndicated financial letters under the pseudonym “Holland” and was taking “proper and valuable attitude on money enquiry.” Brainerd planned to move “very slowly and cautiously so as to … retain confidence of newspapers” as he supplied them with information about the money trust investigation “strictly sub rosa.” If word of this arrangement leaked out, concluded Lamont, the news syndicate could be acknowledged as an information pipeline or “bureau of facts.”
Davison reported that Morgan, Aldrich, and Vail “enthusiastically approve bureau plan. All agree it is of the utmost importance and should be most effective and great power for good.”
In late May, L
amont sent Brainerd to Washington to work with the managing editor of The Washington Post, William P. Spurgeon, and told Davison: “Are furnishing [the Post] with proper literature” for urging the Senate to restrict and perhaps even stop the Pujo investigation. “Are hopeful of strong opposition developing naturally, but politics are so controlling outcome is uncertain.” With “politics” and the liberal press winning the battle for public opinion, Lamont fought back, but his efforts to influence the press only heightened popular perceptions of the Morgan bank as a monster extending its tentacles in all directions.*
As Lamont dispatched Brainerd to The Washington Post in May of 1912, New Haven Railroad president Charles Mellen in Boston was defending himself against the charge of being Morgan’s puppet: “To hear the self-appointed guardians of the public interest, one would think I was simply Mr. Morgan’s lieutenant and stood ready to cut throats whenever he gave the order,” Mellen told The New York Times. Asked why he had gone to Wall Street rather than State Street to raise money for a New England road, he replied, “Because I can get the money in New York when it is needed and I can’t get it in Boston.”†
The Stanley Committee hearings on the steel industry had taken a spring recess. When the investigation resumed at the end of May, Belle hoped it would “not frighten JP and keep him abroad longer than he intends.”
Morgan was traveling on the Continent when the heir to the Hapsburg empire, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, toured his house at Princes Gate. An official at the Austro-Hungarian embassy in London reported to him by mail on May 27 that the Archduke had “enjoyed it immensely.… I regret very much that there has been no opportunity for His Imperial Highness to meet you personally as he has so many interests in common with you and would certainly have enjoyed a talk with you very much.” Morgan never met the man whose assassination by a Bosnian Serb terrorist in 1914 precipitated World War I.‡
Responding to the rising U.S. demand for reform, insurgent Republicans led by Wisconsin Senator La Follette had organized a “Progressive Republican League” that called for increased regulation of transportation and the trusts, an end to corporate and political corruption, and a candidate to run against the conservative Taft. When Roosevelt, the obvious choice, turned them down, La Follette himself launched a campaign. In February 1912, however, TR decided that only he could heal the breach in the party ranks and give the country a rational program for change. At a constitutional convention in Ohio, he told a reporter, “My hat is in the ring.”
He quickly eclipsed the infuriated La Follette, promising to protect the country’s natural resources and individual rights, to promote “the fair distribution of prosperity,” and to “prevent the waste of human welfare which flows from the unfair use of concentrated power and wealth in the hands of men whose eagerness for profit blinds them to the cost of what they do.” Though Roosevelt would need conservative support to win the nomination, he had apparently left his pragmatic instincts in Africa: these proposals, along with an attack on the judiciary as “an instrument for the perpetuation of social and industrial wrong,” drove the Old Guard into the arms of Taft. The battle between the former President and his former disciple raged all spring. One night, a reporter found Taft in the lounge of a train “with his head between his hands.” When the President looked up, he said, “Roosevelt was my closest friend,” and started to cry.
TR had a huge popular mandate going into the convention that June, but the Republican National Committee gave a majority of contested seats to Taft, which secured the nomination. This “crime,” Roosevelt announced to his outraged supporters, “strikes straight at the heart of every principle of political decency and honesty.… We fight in honest fashion for the good of mankind;… we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Seven weeks later, declaring that he felt “strong as a bull moose,” he accepted the nomination of a third, “Progressive” Party. His supporters included Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, Jane Addams, Henry Wallace, Felix Frankfurter, Dean Acheson, Herbert Satterlee, and George Perkins.
The Democrats nominated Woodrow Wilson in July. William Jennings Bryan sponsored a resolution opposing any candidate “who is the representative or under any obligation to J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas F. Ryan, August Belmont, or any other member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class”—clearly unaware of Wilson’s connections to Morgan. Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis, the “people’s attorney” who was an outspoken critic of big business, to serve as an economic adviser to his campaign.
Taft never won much support. According to the historian John Milton Cooper, the fight between Roosevelt and Wilson pitted “the most vivid political presence since Andrew Jackson against the most accomplished political mind since Thomas Jefferson. It was a grand moment in American politics.” Several issues figured in the campaign, but progressive Democrats and former Republican Progressives focused largely on the question of the trusts.
Wilson accused TR of collaborating with the architects of monopoly, and promised to resuscitate competition: his program, which he called “the New Freedom,” would promote liberty, as against the Progressives’ “regulation.” The former president of Princeton announced, somewhat inscrutably, “I am for big business, I am against the trusts.”
Roosevelt charged that his program, “the New Nationalism,” contained “definite and concrete” plans to “correct real abuses and achieve real results,” while his opponent’s “assault on monopoly” was “make-believe.” The Bull Moose candidate had always credited his own ability to distinguish between “good” and “bad” trusts. He sought to punish conduct, not size, and to check abuses of corporate power with the power of government. Wilson pointed out the aristocratic paternalism in TR’s view that America’s problems could be solved only by professional experts (a view Morgan shared), and contrasted it with his own belief that if the people could not “understand the job, then we are not a free people.”
Morgan stayed abroad until late July 1912, courting Lady Sackville, negotiating over the last China loans, and helping the Kaiser win his sailing race at Kiel. When he returned to New York, he gave no statement to the reporters who thronged the dock. Belle found him in a “most angelic frame of mind, at peace with all the world except Taft, Roosevelt and Perkins.”
Dissension in the Morgan ranks reflected the Republican rift. Lamont told a friend in August that he and Morgan would vote for the “secure, careful, intelligent, and broad-minded” Taft, who seemed likely to promote the country’s “happiness and prosperity.” Satterlee and Willard Straight—and the departed Perkins—were firmly in the Roosevelt camp. Louisa wrote to her traveling mother in October: “I am having a very hard time just now! My natural male advisers (my Father and my husband) are on different sides of the fence and I am not even on the fence between them. Isn’t it dreadful? I think they are both wrong! How do you feel about it?… O! I’m so thankful that I am not a man!! and that women do not yet have the vote!”
Anne, probably not so delighted not to be able to vote, attended Progressive Party meetings that fall.
When George Harvey, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, came out for Wilson, the Democratic nominee feared the endorsement would hurt his campaign, since Harper’s was publicly identified with Morgan. Harvey promptly criticized Wilson in an interview with The New York Times.
The Pujo Committee hearings had begun briefly in June, then adjourned until after the fall election. In September, Henry Morgenthau, a major Wilson supporter and chairman of his campaign finance committee, called on Frank Vanderlip at the City Bank. Vanderlip described their wide-ranging conversation to Stillman, and one aspect of it in detail: “Morgenthau tells me that Untermyer is preparing for a thorough going campaign to begin after election … and has got a lot of men working on it now. His whole ambition is to, in some way, get a whitewash for his character. He has offered a hundred thousand dollars (all of this is quite confidential, of course), if he can be assured of a foreign mission. Indeed, he would give any amount for a
n important one, and has even the audacity to think that he might possibly be appointed to England. Wilson will make no promises whatever and they have accepted only $10,000 as yet and probably will accept no more. [Untermyer] would also like to be Attorney General. Morgenthau says that, of course, is quite impossible, although he could imagine that he might be sent to some post of about the grade of Italy.”
In early October, a Senate committee investigating political campaign contributions called Morgan to Washington. The senators wanted to know whether Morgan’s gifts to Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign—$100,000 outright, and $50,000 through the fund organized by Harriman—had “bought” the President’s complicity in the U.S. Steel acquisition of TC&I. It was at these hearings that Morgan said, when asked whether party fund-raisers had expressed gratitude for his having given the additional $50,000, “No. Gratitude has been rather scarce in my experience.” Ledyard told Grenfell that the “Senior” had been “rather dreading the ordeal of testifying,” but “proved a very good witness.” Massachusetts Governor Thomas R. Marshall did not agree. The day after Morgan testified, Marshall declared that the contribution showed him up as a “tightwad”: “President Roosevelt gave him the right in violation of the law to amalgamate the Tennessee Coal and Iron Co. with the Steel Trust. That deal netted Morgan $69,000,000. I repeat that if he only gave back $100,000 of it he is a tightwad.”
