To allay popular fears, it was decided to issue a public statement, and the library conferees prepared one and took it up to show to Secretary Cortelyou at his hotel. Mr. Morgan went with them. He had not yet seen the statement, and when one of the party started to read it aloud, he stopped him at the first sentence. “Is that correct?” he asked. “It will be by the time the statement is published,” was the reply. “No, gentlemen, that won’t do. If it isn’t so now, we can’t say it. We’ve got to state the facts exactly as they are. The public must have the truth and nothing but the truth.” And the statement was modified accordingly.
Mr. Morgan had had just half a century’s preparation for doing the public the immense service he rendered it in “composing” the panic of 1907; for he had been in the banking business since 1857—another panic year. Ability, experience, character, reputation, and financial resources were his, and had put him in a position to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. He had done wonders to preserve the national credit before the year 1907, but it had never fallen to his lot to do anything quite so spectacular (though unintentionally so) as he did at this time. What he did, no one else, however capable, could have done, or, at least, have done so well. It needed just the combination of attributes and qualities he possessed to give the needed authority to his acts.
His whole character was summed up in the brief sentences addressed to his fellow bankers in Mr. Cortelyou’s presence. Always his words were few; but always they were pregnant and unequivocal. What he said he meant, and what he meant he said.
It is no truer that Wall Street—“the Street” par excellence—is the financial center of the Western world than that Mr. Morgan was the dominant personality therein. He himself was not the Street, for that term includes the Stock Exchange, a large part of the activities of which are purely speculative; and at no time in his life was Mr. Morgan a speculator. Wall Street signifies, and will increasingly signify, as time goes on, the abiding-place of bankers rather than of brokers; and it was in the banking world that Mr. Morgan reigned supreme.
The transactions in which he was the chief factor ran all the way up to the more than $1,400,000,000 capital of the United States Steel Corporation. The total amount involved in his organizations and reorganizations of railways, industrial concerns, and public utilities, and his flotations of American and English government bonds, was thousands of millions of dollars. Never has one man exercised such control over the accumulated wealth and undeveloped resources of a great country. The power appeared to be despotic, but if it really was so, the despotism was so tempered by probity and a high sense of responsibility as to lose all the terrors the term usually connotes.
An old friend, a banker in close touch with many of Mr. Morgan’s most important operations, was asked the secret of his success. “There was no secret about it,” said he. “I think his chief asset was integrity. Of course, being honest doesn’t make a man rich. He must have—as Mr. Morgan had—immense energy and ability. But a man in the banking business can’t make a great success with these qualities alone. At the ‘Money Trust’ inquiry it was shown that the Morgan house had more than a hundred million dollars on deposit; and this was by no means high-water mark. Probably these deposits have been twice as great, at times. Now, no matter how brilliant a man is, people don’t put more than two hundred million dollars in his hands unless they know him to be honest to the core, as Mr. Morgan was.” When I quoted this to a clergyman, he said: “That is the business man’s point of view.” “So much the better for business,” I replied. The president of a great commercial bank made this confirmatory comment: “Mr. Morgan’s power lay in his keen sense of trusteeship.”
An intimate friend of Mr. Morgan’s, speaking of the financier’s mental attributes, remarked that his mind never appeared to work deliberately, logically, but to attain its results by intuition, as it were; in other words, he was a man of genius. What the business man usually lacks is imagination; but imagination was perhaps the largest element in Mr. Morgan’s mind. It was this that made his actions great. It was his constructive imagination that made it possible for Mr. Claflin, President of the New York Chamber of Commerce and himself a distinguished man of affairs, to say: “Like the founders of this nation, Mr. Morgan had prophetic vision; like them, he was an organizer of scattered possibilities and a builder of mighty structures such as no man had built before.” It was because of his imaginative force that Senator Root called him “the greatest master of commerce of the world”; and that Mr. Choate said that “only once in a generation is such a mind born in such a body.” And it was this that prompted our English kin to liken him to Cecil Rhodes, to Bismarck, and to Napoleon.
Mr. Morgan’s great gift to Harvard University was made in a way that illustrates his habitual promptness of decision. He and Mr. Rockefeller were among those who were asked to contribute to the habilitation of the Medical School. The latter caused a thorough investigation to be made, which lasted for six months. At the end of that time he received a favorable report and was advised to give $500,000. He bettered the advice, however, by giving a round million. Mr. Morgan’s course was equally characteristic. When the needs of the school were explained to him, he made an appointment to see two or three of the professors at his office. Entering from his private room with his watch in his hand, he said: “I am pressed for time and can give you but a moment. Have you any plans to show me?” The plans were produced and unrolled; and moving his finger quickly from point to point, “I will build that,” he said, “and that—and that—and that. Good morning, gentlemen.” The cost was over a million dollars. Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller had reached exactly the same conclusion as to the merits of the case and the amount of his contribution, but by what different methods!
Mr. Morgan’s activities and achievements in the financial field divide themselves into three main groups: the reorganizing of bankrupt railways, or railways threatened with bankruptcy; the forming of great industrial organizations, and the floating of corporate or government bonds. His chief performance in the last-mentioned line was the flotation of United States Government bonds in the year 1895, when, incidentally, Messrs. Morgan and Belmont arranged with President Cleveland and his Secretary of the Treasury further to protect the national credit by putting a stop to the menacing outflow of American gold to Europe.
At the age of seventy, the veteran financier was called upon to render another great service to the country by organizing and directing the forces that put an end to the panic of 1907, as noted at the beginning of this article. His efforts at this trying time won the gratitude and applause of all right-thinking men. Yet, five years thereafter, in the spectacular search for a bogy popularly styled the “Money Trust,” he was put upon the rack by a congressional committee and subjected to a prolonged quizzing. To a man so proud, so shy and so sensitive, the ordeal was a dreaded one, but he had made no attempt to evade it. In the end, it afforded him an opportunity of bearing emphatic witness that personal integrity is the basis of all credit. The tonic effect of this testimony was felt from one end of the land to the other, and, had the witness been a younger man, his gratification would have much more than outweighed the strain upon his nervous system. As it was, his friends do not attribute to this ordeal his collapse a few weeks later, while on his way to the scene of the excavations in Egypt which the Metropolitan Museum of Art was conducting at his expense.