Background
His parents, Benjamin Wyman and Anna E. J. (Rodbird) Morse were fairly well-to-do, his father having a large part of the control of towing on the Kennebec River.
His parents, Benjamin Wyman and Anna E. J. (Rodbird) Morse were fairly well-to-do, his father having a large part of the control of towing on the Kennebec River.
While at Bowdoin College he was already deep in the shipping business and when he graduated in 1877 he had accumulated a considerable capital.
Suit was instituted and in the course of the testimony it emerged that Morse had let Van Wyck have the stock at half of par, and had in addition lent him the money with which to buy it; also that the docking commissioners had given Morse's company privileges so favorable as practically to exclude serious competition from independents (32 Misc.
Within a few years Morse outgrew Bath; soon he outgrew even State Street, in Boston; to Wall Street he came in 1897.
Morse first made his fame and fortune in New York in ice.
After forming his own Consolidated Ice Company he succeeded, through persuasion or the devious methods of business coercion, in merging it with other companies into the American Ice Company.
Formed in 1899 with a capitalization of sixty million, this was one of the earlier and more flagrant instances of corrupt and overcapitalized promotion in the annals of the American trust movement.
On May 1, 1900, the trust announced an advance in the price of ice for New York City from twenty-five and thirty to sixty cents per hundred pounds.
There was a public outcry, and the New York Journal and Advertiser found that disconcertingly large blocks of American Ice stock were held by Mayor Van Wyck, Boss Croker, and other Tammany leaders.
N. Y. Reports, 1; 55 Appellate Division Reports, 245; Outlook, June 16, 1900).
His Consolidated Steamship Company, formed in 1905, combined most of the important lines outside of the New Haven Railroad interests.
I, p. 875).
The Heinze-Morse banks became the storm center of the panic of 1907, and on Oct. 20 a "vigilance committee" of fifteen delivered to them an ultimatum to sell out and retire permanently from banking (C. A. Conant, A History of Modern Banks of Issue, 1909, p. 713).
He was sentenced in November 1908 to a fifteen-year term in the Atlanta penitentiary, and, despite appeals, he had finally to depart for Atlanta on Jan. 2, 1910.
"There is no one in Wall Street who is not daily doing as I have done, " he said in an interview.
"The late administration wanted a victim; the System wanted a scapegoat" (quoted in Current Literature, Feb. 1910, p. 153).
Since the ice scandals the white light of publicity had never receded from him.
This episode had embittered Morse and estranged him even further from the reigning Wall Street group.
In little over two years Morse was out of jail.
Every exertion by Morse's friends and relatives to secure a pardon or a commutation of sentence from President Taft had been unavailing.
A commission of doctors was eventually appointed to investigate the report that Morse was a dying man.
It reported negatively, but a second commission of army doctors assured the President that Morse had only a few more weeks if he were kept in prison, that he was suffering from a complication of ailments including Bright's disease, and that even if released he could not survive for more than a year.
He reconquered something of his old dominion in the shipping field, until in July 1915 his Hudson Navigation Company was already being sued for unfair competition.
This assumed reality in the incorporation of the United States Shipping Company, a holding company for whose stock was exchanged the stock of sixteen separate subsidiary companies, each organized around a steamship.
The entrance of the United States into the World War gave Morse an even greater opportunity.
Twenty-two of the ships were eventually completed.
Before an indictment could be found, Morse sailed for Havre.
Attorney-General Daugherty sent him a cable to return.
He was arrested and later indicted for conspiracy to defraud the government.
Before the case could be brought to trial he was again indicted with twenty-three others of his group, on a charge of using the mails to defraud prospective investors in United States Steamship stock.
The long and costly trial on the Shipping Board charges resulted in an acquittal, but a subsequent civil suit in 1925 against Morse's company, the Virginia Shipbuilding Company, on charges growing out of the same transactions, resulted in a judgment for the government of over eleven and a half million dollars.
[For the main outlines of Morse's career until the 1907 panic, see Owen Wilson, "The Admiral of the Atlantic Coast, " World's Work, April 1907; and C. F. Speare, "Career of a Great Promoter, " Moody's Mag. , July 1907.
For his shipping activities before his imprisonment, see in addition to the above the testimony of Mellen in the investigation of the New Haven Railroad by the Interestate Commerce Commission, reported in N. Y. Times, May 22, 1914.
For Morse's later shipping career see especially a feature article, Ibid. , July 25, 1926.
of Bath and Environs, Sagadahoc County, Me. , 1607-1894 (1894). ]
The kernel of truth in this statement was the continued hostility which the dominant and conservative group of Wall Street bankers felt toward him.
For the ice-trust episode, see N. Y. Times, Apr. 15, 16, 1899, May 6, 1900; comments in the Outlook, May 9, June 9, 16, July 7, 1900, and in the Independent, May 31, 1900; and "Water Still Freezes, " in Fortune, May 1933.
For his banking activities, see C. M. Keys, "Regulating Banks by Vigilance Committee, " World's Work, Dec. 1907, and "The Story of Morse, " Current Literature, Feb. 1910.
He joined forces with his father and a cousin, and as C. W. Morse & Company the firm entered on an extensive ice-shipping and lumber-transporting business.
She bore him four children and died probably in 1897.