by Jean Strouse
Morgan took Belle to the Met to see his paintings on January 5, before the exhibition opened. To BB she reported: “He seemed anxious to swap opinions with me and fortunately there were about a dozen upon which we could agree—the big Raphael from the National Gallery looks wonderful and the Filippi Lippi more beautiful than ever.… How I wish that the little Crivelli could have been with them! Then we went to look at the Persian things and I was really amazed by his intuitive appreciation of the right thing—Oh! he’s learning and fast. He thinks that he could not stand the pace if I were with him in Europe because I want to look at everything and walk too fast … —I felt like telling him that I was sure you would give me a good recommendation! But he was very sweet & fatherly and amused and treated me as if I were an untamed kitten most of the time. I am glad he is sailing on Tuesday but know I shall be desolate for a while.…”
Morgan’s exuberance after his Pujo “ordeal” alternated, as often before, with darker moods. He seemed nervous and exhausted in early January—Jack pronounced him “very much overdone … by all the Washington business.”
For years friends had been urging Morgan to choose an official biographer. Satterlee brought the subject up that January, after watching his father-in-law destroy several “exceedingly personal” papers. He knew of the letters Morgan had burned after Junius died, and pointed out that the grandchildren would want some kind of record. According to Satterlee, Morgan replied, “Well, if you feel that way about it, why don’t you write it?” Could he talk freely to friends, partners, and relatives? Satterlee asked. Morgan nodded, but said, “be sure that you do not publish anything as long as I am alive.” Satterlee: “And read all your letters and correspondence?” Morgan smiled: “Yes, if you can find them.”
The next day, he sailed for Egypt with Louisa, the Aldriches, the Lythgoes, and his favorite Pekinese, “Shun,” on the White Star’s Adriatic.
He seemed fine most of the way across the Atlantic, reported Louisa, but as they approached Madeira he grew agitated and depressed. Brief trips ashore at Algeciras and Monaco seemed to revive him. The party reached Cairo on January 26, and took suites at Shepheard’s Hotel. Morgan and Louisa had lunch with the legendary British colonial officer Herbert Kitchener, who talked at length about raising cotton in Egypt, and “rather sharply about the antiquities taken out of the country by Americans,” noted Louisa in her diary.
Joined by a physician from Cairo named Tribe, the Americans started up the Nile on board Khargeh on January 31. Three days later Morgan suffered an acute breakdown. The intermittent agitation and anxiety he had been experiencing all month intensified into paranoid, suicidal delusions. His companions reported that he was afraid he would jump out a window or off the deck of the boat. He could not eat. Nightmares and “distorted business ideas” interrupted his sleep. He thought he was going to die, that there was a conspiracy against him, that Egyptians would kill him. Dr. Tribe sedated him with bromides and ordered him to bed. When his party reached the Metropolitan expedition house at Deir el-Bahri, Morgan, too tired for lunch, went back to the boat.
News from New York upset him, as did not receiving news. Louisa told Jack to send cheerful items only, and she edited what arrived. Morgan had planned to continue south to Khartoum in the Sudan, but his companions decided in mid-February to return to Cairo. In a cable marked “Denkstein” (to be decoded only by the addressee), Louisa reported to Jack, using the family code name “Charcoal” for their father: “Charcoal in very nervous condition … result months strain apparent now.… We return down river, doctor thinks greater quiet would be better for him than travel. Tell Markoe.”
Dr. Markoe, familiar with his patient’s hypochondria, sent reassurance: he thought this “trouble” only natural after the “tremendous strain in Washington.” “Charcoal,” he reminded Louisa, had been in excellent physical condition when he left.
Davison testified before the Pujo Committee in February. At the hearings, and in a letter he wrote to the committee on behalf of the bank, he pointed out that large amounts of capital had been concentrated in New York in response to “economic laws which in every country create some city as the great financial centre.” A few prominent bankers had taken it upon themselves to monitor the capital supplies of the country’s expanding industrial economy, in view of America’s antiquated banking system. The picture drawn by the committee, of these financiers controlling the boards of companies with resources of $25 billion, was misleading, Davison continued: much of that money was invested in factories, land, and equipment—it was not available as cash “subject to the selfish use or abuse of individuals.” And the presence of bankers on corporate boards had to do not with a desire to manage daily operations or buy securities at insider prices, but with a sense of their “moral responsibility,” as sponsors of the corporations’ securities, to keep an eye on policy and protect investors’ interests: “For a private banker to sit upon such a directorate is in most instances a duty, not a privilege.”
These explanations did not affect the committee’s conclusions, but they delighted Morgan, who was lucid enough in mid-February to read the reports and wire Davison: “Perfectly splendid. I am deeply grateful to you myself for all you have done. Love to you and Mrs. Davison. I feel quite seedy myself, but Doctor says I am improving.”
Davison replied: “Greatly delighted your cable being, of course, most anxious that my testimony should please you.” To cheer the old man up, he added: “our House stands higher and better today than ever before, which is also true, if possible, of yourself.”
Neither that message nor Markoe’s reassurances eased Morgan’s despair. He asked Satterlee to come to Egypt, to help Louisa and relieve his own mind. He also wanted Markoe or his backup physician, George Dixon, since they understood his condition “better than a stranger can.”
Satterlee and Dr. Dixon left for Egypt at once. Markoe himself was ill. Jack wanted to join them, but his father reminded him through Louisa “how much depends upon your being on the spot in NY—how many interests are in your hands.” Though this directive assigned new authority to Jack, it also kept him thousands of miles away.
Morgan had a sharp attack of chest pain on February 14. Dr. Tribe called it anginal, and it disappeared with medication, but the patient was anxious to get back to Cairo.
A trained nurse was waiting when the travelers reached Shepheard’s Hotel. Lythgoe turned away reporters and dealers.
From Cairo, Tribe cabled Markoe a detailed description of Morgan’s symptoms. “Fickle appetite and slight bladder irritation … aggravated depressed apprehensive, anorexia, insomnia, slight stomatitis and throat irritation. No physical sign chest or abdomen or laryngoscopic. No fever … Mouth and bladder condition improved under treatment but nervous depression and insomnia obstinate with varying phase … anginal attack yielding quickly treatment but patient very upset. Blood pressure hundred and fifty. Pulse regular … Diagnosis—general physical and nervous exhaustion resulting from prolonged excessive strain in elderly subject.”
The stock market slumped on February 17, reacting to rumors about Morgan’s health. Jack announced that his father had merely had an attack of indigestion and was resting comfortably, which worked for about forty-eight hours. Then The New York Times reported the seriousness of the illness, and began to issue daily bulletins: Satterlee heading for Egypt; Morgan confined to room; Morgan goes out for drive; fresh eggs and butter shipped from Cragston; Morgan improving; Pope hopes to see him.
“How I wish we could get rid of this desperate depression,” sighed Louisa. She cabled Jack: “Charcoal wishes you tell mother he sure of her sympathy as she understands suffering from nervous depression better than anyone else.”
“Charcoal” was also having trouble with his teeth. At some point in the last few years he had been fitted with dentures, which now caused him so much discomfort that he refused everything except milk and broth.
On warm mornings he sat on the hotel piazza; in the afternoons he went o
ut for drives. The Kaiser sent a diplomatic agent with a personal message. Senator Aldrich came to call. Markoe wired further messages of reassurance and love.
In early March, Jack relayed the news (vetted as sufficiently cheerful by Louisa) that Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet was not as bad as they had expected. Brandeis was not in it, although William Jennings Bryan would be Secretary of State. Attorney General J. C. McReynolds seemed “honest though somewhat radical.” The President’s inaugural address indicated that matters might be “quieter than heretofore.”
Dixon and Satterlee arrived in Cairo on March 3. They found Morgan thin, exhausted, terrified of losing his mind, obsessed with the idea that he was about to be subpoenaed or cited for contempt of court, convinced that the Khedive was going to harm him, and that he was dying. He asked the same questions over and over, like a child, and felt “acutely the persecutions he has been subjected to,” reported Dixon, “with the intense desire to impress the world that he has never knowingly done a business wrong in his life.”
For over seventy years Morgan had ignored his critics. He shrugged off parental admonition as a boy. Punished by a schoolteacher, he turned the tables and scolded her. After the partners at Duncan, Sherman warned him about his “sharp” and “contracted” manner, he thanked them for the advice but did not change his behavior. Early notes of public disapproval had sounded over his Civil War gun deal and gold corner. After that, choruses of voices had objected in succession to the refunding of the Civil War debt by private bankers and foreign Jews, to the reimposition of a rigid gold standard, to the “Morganization” of railroads, the “collusion” between Wall Street and Cleveland’s White House over the 1895 gold deal, the formation of the billion-dollar trust in 1901, the Northern Pacific panic, the failure of the IMM, the role played by Wall Street titans in 1907, and the power of the “money trust.” Morgan’s sense of calling, his father’s final unqualified benediction, his insulation from people who did not see the world as he did, the trust accorded him by the world’s leading bankers, and his sincere conviction that he was doing indispensable work for the American future, in finance and in the arts, all shielded him from the cumulative force of popular outrage.
The attacks on him that followed the 1907 panic had been so extreme that they strengthened his inclination to listen only to praise. Always tone-deaf to the claims of his adversaries, he was at the end of his life literally hard of hearing as well. By 1911–12, however, the nation’s fury had grown too loud and insistent to ignore—in the Stanley Committee hearings, the prosecution of U.S. Steel, accusations of “banker mismanagement” in the New Haven Railroad mess, the uproar over the loss of the Titanic, the campaign-finance inquiry, and the charges of the Pujo Committee.
During his lifelong struggle with depression, Morgan had often reported feeling “way down,” worthless, paralyzed, “completely used up and unfit for anything.” More than once he had concluded that “the best thing would be for me to give up” work—“I don’t feel good for much anyway.” The few people with whom he discussed his private anguish revealed little about it. Dr. Markoe maintained complete professional silence. Dr. Rainsford reported that when the famous reserve broke down, the “profound emotionalism of his nature had its way with him,” and in his hours of “despairing despondency,” he “deeply doubted himself.” Belle Greene relayed to Berenson the fact but not the content of her Chief’s ruminations about his “unfulfilled hopes … his failures and disappointments.” She also saw the “utter loneliness” of his frenetic social life, and his aim always “to be a builder—not a wrecker in the world of things.”
In January 1912, Stillman had thought Morgan was “whistling to keep his courage up.” By early 1913, a military marching band could not have drowned out the din of reproach. Probably it was a combination of age, physiological deterioration, a long-standing vulnerability to depression, and the experience of being forced to explain himself to hostile inquisitors that tore down Morgan’s bulwarks and brought on this collapse.
His companions in Cairo assured him that he was not going insane and would get well. Dixon told Jack he had found no organic trouble, and that the old man’s vitality seemed “remarkable” but “his business life is finished.”
With the arrival of Satterlee and Dixon, Morgan felt “less absolutely, steadfastly, sure that the country was going to ruin, that his race was run, and his whole life work going for naught!” reported Louisa. Still, he longed to “get out of Egypt and into a ‘Christian country.’ ” On March 10 they went to Rome.
There, they took the royal suite at the Grand Hotel, with eight bedrooms and two parlors. Morgan recovered enough to direct his chauffeur on a drive up the Janiculum, where he showed Louisa and Herbert the building in progress at the American Academy. An American dentist named A. T. Webb fitted him for new dentures. Satterlee warded off art dealers and the press. Flowers arrived from friends on both sides of the Atlantic.
All the doctors urged Morgan to return to New York, but he wanted to go on as usual after Rome to Aix. “I have assured him,” Satterlee told Jack, “that whenever he goes home he will be absolutely immune from being put in the witness chair again, for the rest of his life, as [a doctor’s] certificate would excuse him.” Morgan was “much relieved” by this opinion, but Jack did not agree. He thought his father likely to be subpoenaed the minute he returned. And since “Charcoal” would not be able to “stand many appearances such as he would have to make in the Steel suit, possibly also the Harvester suit, New Haven matters, New York Central matters,” and all sorts of questions before the ICC, Jack advised the sentinels in Rome to keep him abroad: “He will always play any game he is in up to the limit of his power to play, therefore he must not be allowed to use himself up in these futile things.”
The Grand Hotel looked like a besieged fortress, reported London’s Daily Mail. Waves of art dealers and amateurs with bundles of things to sell descended on the hotel “from early morning to late at night and are repulsed with the regularity of surf on the beach.”
Since uncertainty about Morgan’s condition was once again unsettling the financial markets, Satterlee arranged for Dixon to issue a statement to the Associated Press. The doctor announced that Morgan had suffered a nervous prostration brought on by digestive upsets, a head cold, and years of business strain that had “culminated in the vexatious investigations of the so-called Pujo Committee last December.… He is not, and has not been, dangerously ill, and with the absolute rest he is now having his complete restoration to perfect health is assured.” Privately to Jack, Dixon added: “I wish Untermyer and the Pujo Committee were where I would like them to be!”
Though eager to quell rumors about his father’s decline, Jack disliked giving the Pujo hearings any credit. “We have all here maintained the note which [Father] struck so well in Washington,” he told Satterlee, “that he was much too big to be annoyed by miserable little things like that. The admission that it was vexatious called further attention to the feeling that already existed, but which the public throughout the country did not know of, and the statement was to that extent unfortunate.” Jack asked that anyone issuing medical statements in the future check with New York first: “There is no use in letting that little rascal Untermyer smile a happy smile and say, ‘I brought it off after all.’ ” In private, Jack now referred to Untermyer as “the beast.”
Public denials notwithstanding, Morgan was “dangerously ill”—irrational, incoherent, furious when others did not understand him. One day he said, “Has Dr. Phelps done with the horrors?” meaning “Has Dr. Webb finished my teeth?”—a transposition Satterlee found “not inapt” but difficult to read. The old man was affectionate and malleable when depressed, but during “nerve storms,” Satterlee had to hold him while Louisa administered sedatives. Morgan took food and medicine only from her.
He now feared that the Italian King would prevent him from leaving Rome, and complained of being “watched and directed.” To be reduced from indomitable comm
and to childlike dependence and paranoid delusion was as frightening to him as it was painful for his companions to see. He withdrew from everything that once engaged him, refusing even to play solitaire. Most days he lay on a sofa near the fire in the flower-scented suite, with all the windows closed and the thermometer at eighty, smoking a cigar. At night Dixon slept in his room with Satterlee on call next door.
Learning that Fanny’s “nerve specialist,” M. Allen Starr, was in Italy, Dixon asked him to come to Rome. Starr arrived for twenty-four hours on March 21. Morgan took the doctor by car to see the American Academy. “For ten minutes,” Starr reported, he “was as interested and as active mentally as ever,” then lapsed back into indifference. Since this diversion seemed briefly beneficial, Starr urged the others to let their patient do what he wanted whenever they could.
On Easter Sunday, March 23, he wanted to go to church. His caretakers assented, but the outing brought on a new collapse. Dixon, fearing that “the Commodore was getting out of our control,” ordered him to bed for a complete rest in a darkened room with nurses around the clock, and asked Louisa not to spend so much time there. “Father sleepy & heavy with bromide & veronal,” she wrote in her diary the next day. Removing Morgan’s last shreds of autonomy and pleasure directly contravened Starr’s advice, but a more liberal regimen probably would have made no difference.
“We are out of woods,” Dixon wired New York on Wednesday. Morgan would not eat, though he liked his new dentures. He stopped recognizing people. One night he insisted on getting up and going to school. Dixon gave him codeine and morphine. Starr came back, and in view of the patient’s deterioration, advised moving the entire entourage to Dover House. On Saturday, March 29, Satterlee ordered an ambulance and special train for Monday morning.
On Sunday, however, Morgan was delirious and too weak to be moved. “Very little hope favorable turn,” Louisa cabled Jack: “Comfort in fact he is unconscious and does not suffer. Dearest sympathy for you all so far away. Everything possible being done.”
