Pip's Portrait

J. PIERPONT MORGAN: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT--Herbert L. Satterlee--Macmillan ($3.75).

The elder J. (for John) Pierpont Morgan distrusted newspapermen, avoided "magazine men," and there is no record of his having high regard for any writers except the dead. Unlike the Rockefellers, the Morgans nave not gone in for personal pressagentry; neither have they unbosomed themselves to historians. Consequently, the chief books on the elder Morgan, able in other respects, are either obscure or theatrical on the interesting question of how Morgan felt about being Morgan, boy and man.

Herbert Livingston Satterlee's intimate portrait replaces the spotlight with genteel daylight. A Manhattan lawyer now growing venerable, Satterlee knew the Morgans when they were neighbors of the Satterlee family at Highland Falls on the Hudson in the '80s and '90s. He married Louisa Morgan, the eldest daughter, in 1900, and was a close friend and business aide of his father-in-law until his death in Rome in March 1913. Satterlee's 583-page book, now published after 26 years, is astonishingly complete, high-minded, reverent, and occasionally ingenuous or supercilious enough to transfix non-Union Club readers.

"When little Pierpont came into the world [in 1837] there were a great many business troubles," writes Mr. Satterlee gravely. Not greatly troubled was the well-to-do Morgan family of Hartford, Conn., though little Pierpont's grandfather, red-nosed, craggy-faced Abolitionist Preacher John Pierpont of Boston, had fights with some of his non-Abolitionist parishioners. In his school days "Pip" was a fun-loving, feverish, arrogant character with a temper and a direct, wide-open gaze. He and Joe Wheeler, later a Confederate cavalry leader, risked their necks and expulsion to carve their initials on the school belfry. While Father Junius Morgan was becoming a rich merchant banker in Boston and London, Pierpont went to school at Vevey, Switzerland ("makes fun of things," noted the schoolmaster); later to the University of Gottingen, where he proved himself a born mathematician, fond of fine clothing and the fair sex. "No one ever enjoyed shopping more than he did, at any age. . . ."

In business in Manhattan after 1857, Pierpont was a popular and princely fellow who enjoyed arranging elaborate parties, also liked to sing hymns on Sunday evenings at the homes of friends (his favorite through life: Blest be the tie that binds). Like Robert Browning he loved and married, in 1861, a pretty girl who was dangerously ill. He carried her off on a Mediterranean cruise but could not make her well. According to an old story (as repeated in Dos Passes' 1919): "When the guns started booming at Fort Sumter, young Morgan turned some money over reselling condemned muskets to the U. S. Army. . . ." According to Satterlee, Pierpont merely lent the money used in this crooked deal, taking only a normal commission for himself. One flaw in Lawyer Satterlee's case seems to be his statement that "Pierpont . . . did not lend any money on [a] second shipment of carbines." Lewis Corey, in The House of Morgan (1930), quotes the Reports of the House of Representatives to show that Morgan filed a bill with the government for $58,175 for a second batch of carbines, a claim on which an investigating committee later allowed him $11,008.

Money was J. P. Morgan's specialty; how, in general, he made it in syndicate stock selling is part of the history of U. S. industrial expansion. Morgan's passion for order, his unique power of concentration, left him worn out after a day's work. Bad headaches laid him up frequently. His firm became literally death on partners. Morgan himself had to take a vacation every few months, often took a party of friends with him. "I can do a year's work in nine months, but not in twelve," he said.

He developed customs and stuck to them: his annual spring visit to London ("no matter how often he went at other times of the year"), his annual visit to Worth's in Paris to buy gowns for his ladies, his mathematician's love for evening solitaire ("it was natural that he should try to create order among the cards . . ."). In little things as in large he liked to display his power; his family regarded him as a great tease. He prided himself for 50 years on his ability to dress for dinner --immaculately--in six minutes. For many years he and a stubborn old native named Johnny Strang tried to beat each other to a certain pew in the church at Highland Falls.

A merchant in money and in costly goods, Morgan had no interest in land as such or as real estate investment. All he needed, he said, was "a place to live in and a lot in the cemetery." His testiness as an old man Satterlee attributes to his shyness about his swollen nose. When King Edward VII went to tea with Mr. Morgan he admired the Morgan pictures but asked why one was so unsuitably hung. Morgan smoked in silence for a minute, then rumbled: "Because I like it there, sir." The massive old man felt at home in massive Egypt; one unforgettable picture in Satterlee's book is of J. P. Morgan at the Tombs of the Kings, reading the afternoon service from the Book of Common Prayer.

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