Morgan: American Financier

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The Barnes & Noble Review

A friend of J.P. Morgan once described her reaction upon seeing the great financier make his grand entrance into a room: "He was the king. He was it!" This was the Gilded Age, the Age of Excess, and the tycoons seemed to rule America. Morgan held the formidable moneymen and society ladies of late-19th-century New York in thrall. To farmers and laborers, he was oppression itself, the man who made the industrial trusts that kept prices up and wages down. To his fellow gentlemen of business, he was a force for order at a chaotic time in America's financial history. It is an endlessly interesting question: By what means did a powerful man achieve his power? In Morgan's case, was it connections, native talent, forceful personality, favorable circumstances, or all of the above? Naturally, the final answer is the correct one.

Morgan had an influential banker father, well-placed friends, mathematic and financial acumen, prodigious energy, an irresistible personality, and a business climate conducive to the making of money and the building of fortunes. Jean Strouse, acclaimed author of Alice James: A Biography , is thorough, penetrating, and perhaps a bit revisionist in her treatment of this titan of American banking. (As enjoyable as this book is, at nearly 700 pages, no one will wish it longer.) Strouse has softened the image created by most earlier writers of Morgan as heartless tyrant and bloodsucker of the masses. She sensibly contends that Morgan merely behaved in the way that nature and aristocratic tradition dictated, that we could not expect him to dootherwise,and that he really wasn't as bad as we have been led to believe.

There is a persuasive argument to be made that in the explosion of commercial activity in America following the Civil War, someone had to step in to harness the whirlwind. There were no laws, written or unwritten, capable of doing so. Thus the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and the Goulds moved into the vacuum. The industrialists appear to us now to have been greedy and rapacious. Morgan does not. While he made money, he seems not to have been motivated so much by the acquisition of wealth as by the patrician's instinctive yearning for stability. Morgan saw his building of railroad, steel, electric, and other trusts as a technique for achieving stability at a time of shocking commercial turbulence.

Born in Connecticut, world-traveled, and perfectly suited to the Big Apple, Morgan was an art collector, bon vivant, social lion, and, most importantly, a conduit for the immense wealth that flowed during this period from Europe to America. He possessed the typical patrician's nose, bulbous and purple, the product of a grotesque skin ailment. But his eyes sparkled, his intelligence shone, his charm bubbled forth when he wished it to, along with frequent ferocity and frequent kindness. He was very religious, yet he kept mistresses. He spent little time worrying about the plight of poor folks, yet he gave millions to social causes, hospitals, churches, relief agencies. He worked hard; he played hard; he enjoyed life. Although supremely self-confident, he was high-strung and prone to ailments such as boils, earaches, seizures, and melancholy. He worked his partners literally to death. He wore them out and he might wear you out, too, but the man that Jean Strouse gives us was something of a wonder of nature, and as you read her book, you will feel his force.

—Richard Norman
Richard Norman, a journalist and freelance writer, lives in Norwich, Connecticut. Norman is currently writing a novel, The City of Goliath .

Maury Klein

...a magnificient, insightful study of the only man who was wven more influential and mysterious than [Rockefeller]....Ms. Strouse's biography is a superb one indeed. Rich in detail, informed by a wealth of new sources, written in a clear style that wears well, it provides the fullest and most revealing look at this remarkable, complex man that we are likely to get.
— Wall Street Journal

David Michaelis

The Morgan that Jean Strouse has brought to life in her masterful, long-awaited biography is deeply human, the most intricate and integrated portrait we have had yet. This Morgan is stripped of varnish but remains grandly scaled and exquisitely rendered. Strouse, a gutsy, sympathetic writer, whose first biography Alice James turned the neglected diarist and remarkable younger sister of William and Henry James into and unexpectedly complex figure, has produced an equally brilliant work with a vastly more intimidating subject.... An exemplar in American biography, Ms Strouse sees deeply into the forest by chopping down every tree.
— New York Observer

Albert Mobilio

...Strouse ably separates the facts from the lively fictions....[T]he myths are much more fun....Morgan is revealed for all his wealth and European artto have had the soul of Willy Lomangeting over by force of characteron a shoeshine and a grimace. —Fortune

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

[Offers] a coherent portrait of Morgan....[S]hows us a man who was mercurial; given to depression and nervous exhaustion...vulnerable to flattery, and occasionally...sensitive to criticism....Ms. Strouse reveals a man whose sensuous nature was deeply attracted to art...[Her] revelations tell a story whose interest is only limited by the inherent dryness of banking as an activity. —The New York Times

Richard Lingeman

...Solidly researched....elucidates in ample detail Morgan's financial maneuverings....If the mysteries of Morgan's inner psyche remain dark, Strouse has clarified the public career and swept away some of the mud slung at him by previous biographers....Yet she does not seek to exculpate her subject...
— The New York Times Book Review

George J. Church

[Strouse] has produced a more balanced and crisply written—though at times unnecessarily detailed—portrait than her subject could ever have drawn.
— Time Magazine

Publishers Weekly

Often celebrated as the ideal capitalist or excoriated as the robber baron who most epitomized the excesses and iniquities of the Gilded Age, J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) has, in Strouse, finally been accorded a biographer whose talents match his enormous legacy. Strouse (whose Alice James won the Bancroft Prize) seamlessly weaves Morgan's exploits as America's leading banker with his frenetic social life, in the process vividly evoking the spirit of the Gilded Age. Though she captures Morgan's famed imperiousness and bluster, she paints a much fuller portrait of Morgan than has hitherto been available. Morgan was the consummate financier. Responsible for the consolidation of most of the nation's railroads as well as the formation of U.S. Steel, he also helped underwrite the creation of General Electric, International Harvester and AT&T. Before there was a Federal Reserve Board, he functioned as America's de facto central banker. He famously enjoyed his wealth and wasn't shy about spreading his money around. A passionate lover of the arts, he served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and played a major role in building that institution into one of the finest of its kind. Strouse spent more than 10 years researching her latest work, and readers are rewarded with numerous nuggets about the colorful people who surrounded Morgan. The Morgan who emerges from these pages is, for all his hard ambition and ruthlessness, not merely ruthless and greedy. By blending the different facets of this most complicated man, Strouse humanizes — without shrinking or whitewashing — one of America's mythic figures.

Library Journal

Last year's popular life of John D. Rockefeller signaled that the time was right for a new look at his omnipotent Gilded Age contemporary, J.P. Morgan. Situated ably between his worshippers and his debunkers, Strouse separates fact from Morgan myth and finds beneath the imperious public persona the flesh-and-blood man who was more powerful in his time than Bill Gates. (LJ 3/15/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Terry W. Hartle

Her book will lead to a reappraisal of this complex, enigmatic man....[A] well-written, carefully documented, and balanced work that describes Morgan's successes and failures....[C]arefully researched...benefits enormously from her energy and diligence.
— Christian Science Monitor

Richard Lingeman

...Solidly researched....elucidates in ample detail Morgan's financial maneuverings....If the mysteries of Morgan's inner psyche remain dark, Strouse has clarified the public career and swept away some of the mud slung at him by previous biographers....Yet she does not seek to exculpate her subject...
— The New York Times Book Review

David Gates

...[Strouse has] given us a smart, scrupulous account of what [Morgan] did and what it was like to be in his presence.
— Newsweek

Kirkus Reviews

A superbly researched, well-written biography of a great-and, in the author's view, somewhat misrepresented-figure in American history. J. Pierpont Morgan's (1837-1913) every touch, it seemed, yielded pure gold. Some of his contemporaries admired his skill at making money, whereas most others despised him. Bancroft Prize-winning biographer Strouse (Alice James, 1980) writes that their disdain, fueled by populist and progressive views, has colored the historical take on Morgan such that he's seen "as an icon of capitalist greed" — as mere robber baron and plutocrat. She paints a far more complex portrait of someone who, she argues, deserves to be rated as the chief architect of American industrial democracy. At his death, Morgan was the world's most prominent banker; he'd overseen the economic restructuring of America from a debtor nation into self-sufficiency; he built railroads, engineered the mergers of huge corporations (to form, for instance, US Steel), and surrounded himself with rare works of art and literature, now housed in some of the nation's leading museums and libraries. He accomplished all this, says Strouse, with a forceful intellect and a strong character-but also by taking any number of ethical shortcuts: He amassed an early fortune, for example, through profiteering in the Civil War. The author recognizes that Morgan's critics, then as now, had reason to resent the man; after all, he controlled a huge share of the international economy and did much to break unions and thwart the ambitions of workers' organizations. He showed little regard for "class conflicts and social problems," and evidently believed that "his financial expertise conferred politicalprerogatives, and that his larger concerns took precedence over the interests of the people who opposed him." Still, Strouse gives us an eminently human version of Morgan as a man guided always by profit but not without a sense of of social responsibility, a figure who, for good or ill, contributed in many ways to the structure of the modern world. Especially at a time when American wealth and monopoly again reign, this life of a notable dollar-diplomat is most welcome.