by Jean Strouse
MORGAN’S DOCTORS ADMIT CONDITION IS “MOST CRITICAL,” reported The New York Times, and the Sun announced: J. P. MORGAN SINKING FAST. Jack reminded Satterlee and Dixon to clear all public statements through New York.
On Monday, March 31, Morgan’s temperature went up to 104½ and his pulse to 140. He slept quietly. Louisa held his hand all morning. She cabled Jack shortly after noon: “Charcoal died today twelve five.”
That evening a young American woman wrote to her fiancé from Rome: “Dr. Dixon has been in here a great deal and told us in so many words on Friday that the old man was dying, and also told us about lots of the facts of his illness. It seems terrible to me that a man like Mr. Morgan – a man with his mind – should have to end his life in that state. He was without doubt a wonderfully big man and I don’t think there’s anything fine enough we can say about him. Generous to a degree and the most public spirited man in America, I’ve heard hundreds of people say, and even if he had a great many bad points, his good ones certainly out-balance them by a great deal. Dr. Dixon said that the man who said this Untermyer affair would kill Mr. Morgan … struck it right. The insult and humility [she probably meant humiliation] of it all has been on the poor old man’s mind day and night and has resulted in the nervous prostration that made him fail as quickly as he has during the last week or ten days. To think of the smallness of that horrid Jew [Untermyer] to cause so much trouble and ignominy for the most respected people.… [Morgan] died at 12:30 and they tried to keep it quiet until the stock exchange closed at home, but I suppose they couldn’t.…
“All the parties here for to-night have been given up and the place seems to be very much shocked.… All the Embassies are closed and his death is as much of an event as it must be at home. He was a great deal more than just a private citizen, wasn’t he?”
A certificate filed by an Italian physician in Rome attributed Morgan’s death to “dispepsia psichica.” Psychic dyspepsia is a wonderful description of the old man’s condition during his last few weeks, but the physiological cause of his death was never ascertained. His physician at Aix, worried about his high blood pressure in 1905, had feared a “cerebral congestion.” In 1913 Morgan probably suffered a series of small strokes, beginning on the Nile or even earlier, followed by a massive stroke at the end. Whatever the physical mechanism, and regardless of what Jack wanted the public to think, the clash of ideologies on the floor of the Pujo Committee hearing room, and the crescendo of public cynicism about the values by which Morgan had conducted his life’s work, contributed to his demise.
The stock market went up the day after he died—it had discounted the news in advance—and flags on Wall Street flew at half-mast. Condolences and tributes streamed in to the Grand Hotel from all over the world, nearly four thousand overnight. Pope Pius told the press, “He was a great and good man.” Kaiser Wilhelm sent a personal message to the family through his ambassador in Rome and a wreath to place on the coffin. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan instructed the American ambassador to assist the Morgan family in any way he could. Charles Thorley, Morgan’s New York florist, wired his Roman counterparts to buy up all the orchids and lilies of the valley in the Eternal City (“because I knew Mr. Morgan’s taste for quiet colors”) to fill the orders that would come.
The Satterlees held a private service at the hotel, then accompanied the body by train to Paris and Le Havre. Le Figaro described the accumulating tributes—the Italian army in Rome marching before Morgan’s coffin as before a king’s, mourners in Paris covering it with orchids, carnations, roses, and palms, French soldiers at Le Havre saluting it with high honors—and concluded: “No other American citizen would have received such marks of respect from Europe—and no other would have merited this homage.”a On April 5, the Satterlees sailed with the casket for New York on the France.
Frank Vanderlip wrote to James Stillman: “The king is dead. All New York is at half-mast. There are no cries of ‘Long live the king,’ for the general verdict seems to be that there will be no other king; that Mr Morgan, typical of the time in which he lived, can have no successor, for we are facing other days.”
Belle Greene cabled Berenson, “My heart and life are broken.”
A few hours after Morgan died, Dr. Dixon wired for Jack’s approval a draft of a new medical bulletin for the press, mentioning the severe strain of 1907 and other harassing pressures leading up to December 1912 as having precipitated the banker’s decline. Jack told him to omit these references, and the statement as published two days later said nothing about financial panics or congressional hearings. Information proved as difficult to control as money, however. Dr. Starr told reporters that the emotions aroused by the Pujo investigation had brought on Morgan’s breakdown, and the story circulated widely in the United States. Surprised members of the committee recalled the old man’s apparent ease on the witness stand, and denied that they had had anything to do with his death.
The France reached New York on April 11. Morgan’s casket, surrounded by flowers, was laid out in his library on 36th Street under the white pall that had covered Junius’s body twenty-three years earlier. The Commodore had left explicit instructions for his funeral: it was to be exactly like his father’s. Specifying the clergymen who would preside, the order of the hymns, and the trains that would carry mourners from New York to Hartford, he was stage-managing his own burial. Even he could not have arranged for it to take place on Junius’s one hundredth birthday.
On Monday, April 14, the New York Stock Exchange was closed in his honor till noon. At 9:23 A.M., the bronze doors of the library swung open and six men carried the coffin down the steps to a waiting hearse. Five thousand jacqueminot roses left a trail of red petals behind. Four carriages followed the hearse through streets cleared by New York City police to St. George’s Church at Second Avenue and 16th Street.
An all-male choir led the procession into the church at 10:00. There were fifteen hundred people inside, and estimates of the crowd gathered in Stuyvesant Park went as high as thirty thousand. The clergymen followed the choir, with Bishop Lawrence reading, “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.…” The honorary pallbearers came next—George Baker, Jim Markoe, Elihu Root, Bob Bacon, Lewis Cass Ledyard, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Robert W. de Forest, Joseph Choate, Elbert Gary, George Bowdoin, Morton Paton, Seth Low. As the coffin entered the church ahead of Morgan’s family, the choir sang “Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days.”
Flowers banked the chancel. The Kaiser had sent a giant cross of orchids, the government of France a spray of palms. From James Bryce, British ambassador to the United States, there was a garland of violets and lilies of the valley, and from the Italian King a wreath of American Beauty roses tied in ribbons of red, white, and green. The Morgan family accepted only a fraction of the floral tributes, sending the rest to the Lying-In and other hospitals around New York.
Bishops Lawrence (Massachusetts), Greer (New York), and Chauncey Brewster (Connecticut), and Karl Reiland, the rector of St. George’s, conducted the simple service. Among those attending were Sturgeses, Chauncey Depew, James J. Hill, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, Thomas Fortune Ryan, the Beavor-Webbs, H. L. Higginson, W. K. Vanderbilt, Endicott Peabody, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Charles Coffin, August Belmont, Jr., Henry Clay Frick, Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Cortelyou, Frank Vanderlip, Charles Mellen, Otto Kahn, Mortimer Schiff, Isaac Seligman, Anson Phelps Stokes, Henry Walters, Edward Robinson, Benjamin Strong, George W. Perkins, the Morgan bank’s partners and staff, the Corsair crew, and representatives of the clubs, corporations, charities, religious and genealogical societies, and cultural institutions with which Morgan had been affiliated. His surviving sisters, Mary and Juliet, were both in Europe.
According to Morgan’s instructions, there was no eulogy. The choir sang his favorite hymns—“Asleep in Jesus” and “Lead, Kindly Light.” Dr. Reiland read from First Corinthians 15.
Bishop Greer led the creed and prayers. Then the black baritone from St. George’s choir, Harry Burleigh, sang a solo, “Calvary.” Bishop Brewster pronounced the benediction. To the sounds of “For all the Saints who from their labors rest,” the pallbearers carried the coffin out to the hearse. Morgan’s family and close friends drove directly from the church to Grand Central Terminal, where they boarded a private seven-car train for Hartford.
Flags in Hartford were at half-mast under a gray April sky when the funeral train arrived at 2:00 P.M. City and state government offices had closed for the afternoon, as had all of Hartford’s schools and the businesses along its main streets. A large crowd was gathered at the station, and people three-deep lined the sidewalks as the cortège drove three and a half miles through town, past the black-draped house in which Morgan had been born, to the Cedar Hill Cemetery. The city fire bell tolled seventy-six times—the old man would have been seventy-six in three days. He had selected his burial spot, directly opposite his parents in the Morgan family plot at the crest of a hill. As at Junius’s interment in May of 1890, a large white tent protected the mourners from rain. Flowers from the library and church encircled the mourners, and red roses lined the grave.
Bishop Brewster opened the brief service—“We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.…” The red-granite monument Pierpont had ordered to mark the family plot after Junius died bore an inscription from Romans 6:5: “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection.” The rain held off.b
Memorial services were held that day in London and Paris. The Canon of Westminster, William Boyd Carpenter, conducted the Anglican service at Westminster Abbey. King George and the Queen Mother sent representatives, as did the governments of Italy, Germany, and Argentina. Among the others present were Prime Minister and Mrs. Asquith, Leopold Rothschild, Junius Morgan, the Harcourts, E. C. Grenfell, Vivian and Lady Sybil Smith, Lady Dawkins, Sir Thomas Lipton, Sir Ernest Cassell, Almeric Paget, and Sir Hercules Read. At the American Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris, draped in black cloth lined with silver, those who came to honor Morgan included James Stillman, Senator and Mrs. Aldrich, Ambassador and Mrs. Myron Herrick, Jacques Seligmann, William Riggs, Mrs. Rutherfurd Stuyvesant, and Dr. and Mrs. Bashford Dean.
The day after the funeral, Fanny wrote in her diary: “Pouring … Spent morning in bed & Pierpont [she meant Jack] read us Pierpont’s beautiful & wonderful will.”
Newspapers published the contents of the will a week later. Morgan had left most of his estate to his son, just as his father had done. He gave Fanny $1 million in trust, specifying that the income, combined with that of a trust Junius had set up for her (“which fund has been very largely increased during my lifetime”), should yield $100,000 a year—equivalent to roughly $1.5 million in the 1990s. He also left her Cragston and the house at 219 Madison, with all their contents, for the rest of her life. He had set up a $3 million trust for each of his daughters, and gave $1 million each to his sons-in-law, Herbert Satterlee and Will Hamilton. To Jack, he left $3 million outright and everything else—the library, his art collections, English houses, Corsair, Camp Uncas, the Newport “fishing box,” other real estate holdings, his interests in the Morgan banks, securities, bank accounts, positions in New York cultural institutions, wine cellars, and cigars. The total value of the estate would be calculated three years later at $80 million.
Morgan named Jack, Satterlee, Hamilton, and Ledyard as his executors. He directed them to set aside for Jim Markoe a sum that would yield $25,000 a year for the rest of the doctor’s life, and the same amount to Annette if she survived her husband. To Belle Greene he left $50,000, and asked his heirs to keep her on at a salary not less than what she was earning at the time of his death. He gave $600,000 in trust to St. George’s Church; $250,000 outright to his friend and yacht designer, J. Beavor-Webb; $100,000 to the House of Rest for Consumptives in Spring Lake Beach, New Jersey, designated “The Amelia Sturges Morgan Memorial Fund”; $100,000 each to Fanny’s sisters; and £1,000 a year to Alice Mason (who had, it turned out, died two months before he did). Adelaide had long since been taken care of by a trust fund that had no bearing on the estate. Morgan gave smaller amounts to other friends, the Corsair captain, his private secretary, and people who worked at the library, his houses, and the bank. He directed his executors to continue his charitable contributions, and to follow a number of other specific instructions. The will ran to thirty-four pages.
His art collections, which were eventually valued for estate purposes at $20 million, were in fact worth far more—possibly three to four times more. Morgan had estimated their value in November 1912 at $50 million. He said in his will: “it has been my desire and intention to make some suitable disposition of [the collections] … which would render them permanently available for the instruction and pleasure of the American people. Lack of the necessary time to devote to it has as yet prevented my carrying this purpose into effect.” He hoped Jack would make some such disposition, and suggested that the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford be part of it, but expressly did not intend his wishes to impose binding obligations. He did not mention the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He had assumed full responsibility for virtually everything that interested him all his life—from account books, banks, railroads, government fundings, industrial corporations, the Episcopal Church, and New York’s major cultural institutions, to his guests’ country weekends, Memie’s failed cure, French couturiers’ designs, the roses in his English garden, the pattern on his salad plates, and the details of his own funeral. Yet when it came to the works of art he had accumulated with such passion over the course of decades, he simply opened his hands and let them go. Two days after he died, the newspapers announced that New York City’s Board of Estimate would appropriate $750,000 to build a new wing for his collections at the Met. It was too late.
The will opened with a vivid declaration of the Evangelical doctrine Morgan had believed in all his life—that it is not man’s works but only Christ’s death on the Cross that offers atonement for sin. “I commit my soul into the hands of my Saviour,” he wrote, “in full confidence that having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood He will present it faultless before the throne of my Heavenly Father; and I entreat my children to maintain and defend, at all hazard, and at any cost of personal sacrifice, the blessed doctrine of the complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ, once offered, and through that alone.”
Newspapers across the country quoted this passage approvingly on Saturday, April 20. The press response was “not a matter of chance,” Lamont told Davison: “We worked over the matter with a good deal of care, and prepared a 2,000 word summary of the will, which the A.P. used without change and telegraphed all over the country. I also prepared a brief summary to assist the New York papers, and further memoranda for the New York editors whom we knew, pointing out certain striking features.”
Nonetheless, an irreverent editor in Texas ran the story that Saturday under the headline MORGAN GIVES SOUL TO MAKER, MONEY TO SON. Ministers quoted the will in their sermons the next morning, and on Monday, New York’s Evening Post warned: “it is perhaps a little unwise for clergymen to seize upon this, in the way in which so many of them did in the pulpit yesterday. Their praise could easily be perverted into an apparent belief that what the world most needs is … an overwhelming demonstration that godliness is profitable. There are other Christian doctrines more in need of emphasis just now.”
Teddy Grenfell was in New York when he learned of his senior partner’s death. Returning to England on board the White Star’s Olympic, he wrote to his fiancée that for Morgan more than for most people, “a sick old age would have been full of misery. His life had been one of fight, he had no taste for reading nor gifts of conversation, & a life of inactivity, bittered by illness, would have been a living torture to himself & his friends.… It is rare
that the obituary notices of an American financier can be written without unpleasant criticism of methods & intentions & yet, though he was almost brutally independent of the press, the notices of JPM were uniformly pleasant.…
“He filled a great place & on two occasions especially saved America from disaster. It may be that his work was finished & that no occasion will again arise for treatment of a crisis in the peculiarly masterful manner that he adopted.
“Probably that is for the general good. The one man power may bring evils unless the agent is entirely single-minded & with human nature as it is, ambition jeopardizes single-mindedness.” If Grenfell meant that self-interest jeopardized objectivity, he echoed the concerns of the American editorialists who praised Morgan’s Pujo testimony with the reservation, “It will never do to say that unchecked power is a good thing because it is in the hands of good men.”
Assuming “moral responsibility” for the growth of the strongest economy in the modern world, Morgan had earned the trust of leading international financiers and statesmen. His brusque exterior notwithstanding, he did care about what people thought of him, but he neither looked for popular favor nor altered course in the face of opposition. He could no more give up what he had been doing all his life than he could explain it. As he said, he thought it was the thing to do.
* Elaborating on his plan for a publishing trust, Lamont thought Brainerd could buy leading newspapers in Washington, Chicago, and New York, as well as associations that sold packaged inserts to country papers, and that as a result the bankers would openly “control powerful and widespread outlets for distribution of facts.” Including Harper’s Weekly, which Morgan was already supporting, the entire operation, “with the unusual journalistic talent with which we are in close touch and can command, can be made into an exceedingly profitable enterprise.” Things did not work out that way, but Lamont did buy New York’s Evening Post in 1917. Decades later he was still trying to sweep back the sea of critical public statements about Morgan. After Henry Steele Commager wrote about the Pujo investigation in The New York Times Magazine in 1938, Lamont sent him a letter of corrections; he sent similar dispatches to Endicott Peabody (who criticized Morgan’s handling of the 1895 gold crisis in the Groton Quarterly in 1945), Morgan biographer Frederick Lewis Allen (1949), and H. G. Wells, who published an interview with Joseph Stalin in the Herald Tribune in 1934. Lamont took issue with Wells’s description of Morgan as a “parasite upon society” who “only thought about profit,” but he failed to change the author’s mind. Morgan, however, had a more interesting advocate than Tom Lamont. Stalin, in his interview with Wells, observed: “In speaking of the capitalists who strive only for profit, only to get rich, I do not want to say that these are the most worthless people capable of nothing else.… We Soviet people learn a great deal from the capitalists. And Morgan, whom you characterize so unfavorably, was undoubtedly a good, capable organiser.”
