Background
Whitney George was born on October 9, 1885 in Boston, Massachussets, the son of George Whitney, president of the Union National Bank of Boston, and of Elizabeth Whitney. Whitney grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill.
Whitney George was born on October 9, 1885 in Boston, Massachussets, the son of George Whitney, president of the Union National Bank of Boston, and of Elizabeth Whitney. Whitney grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill.
He attended Groton School, from which he graduated in 1903, three years after his father's death. His uncle, Edward F. Whitney, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, helped him through college. In 1907 he received the B. A. from Harvard.
In summer 1907, having long ago set aside childhood dreams of becoming a doctor - "I couldn't afford it and wasn't prepared to make a sacrifice" - he decided to go into business. Whitney started as a runner in the Boston offices of Kidder, Peabody and Company, one of the country's leading private banking houses. He remained with the firm for two years, gaining experience in deposit and merchant banking, foreign exchange, and underwriting corporate and government securities. He liked the work, and decided to look for wider opportunities in New York City. In August 1909, Whitney joined Redmond and Company, a small Wall Street firm that specialized in retailing foreign public utility issues. A year later, with two other men in their mid-twenties, he helped organize Markoe, Morgan and Whitney, a brokerage house. In October 1915, Whitney left his firm to join J. P. Morgan and Company, the preeminent private banking house in the country. He considered the position well worth the sacrifice of giving up his own business. At Morgan's, his first assignment was to help distribute the $500 million Anglo-French loan. The operation gave him his first close experience with underwriting, syndication, and nationwide distribution of a large bond offering, skills he sharpened on subsequent wartime loans for the Allied governments. Early in January 1915, Great Britain had appointed Morgan and Company its purchasing agents in the United States. Four months later France signed a similar agreement with the firm, which set up a special export department, headed by Edward R. Stettinius, Sr. , to deal with the Allies' war business. Whitney worked closely with Stettinius, making certain that funds were always available to pay for the massive war purchases. Late in 1917, because of Whitney's detailed knowledge of Allied finances, Thomas W. Lamont took him to London and Paris to settle the firm's accounts with the British and French governments. While there, Whitney assisted Lamont in his capacity as unofficial confidential adviser to Colonel Edward House, the head of a special American mission struggling to coordinate Anglo-French financial and economic plans with those of the U. S. Treasury. Impressed by his young associate's knowledge of complex financial questions, Lamont took Whitney with him to Paris in January 1919. Working with Lamont, a representative of the U. S. Treasury at the peace conference, Whitney wrestled with the difficult and controversial problem of determining Germany's reparation payments. This work, together with his experience in war finance, gave him a wide knowledge of both domestic and international banking and business, talents the Morgan partners valued and rewarded. On December 31, 1919, he was made a partner, a position that brought him "tremendous prestige" outside the firm but no change in his work load. During the 1920's, J. P. Morgan and Company continued to occupy first place among the country's private banks, conducting an extensive domestic and foreign banking and securities business. Whitney worked on several major European reconstruction and currency stabilization loans. In some cases, such as those of Austria (1923), France (1920, 1921, 1924), and Italy (1925), he helped determine the terms and organize the syndicates that distributed the bonds. In other instances, such as the German (Dawes) loan of 1924, he occupied himself only with syndication and sales. Other foreign government loans with which he was closely involved included the Cuban (1923) and Japanese (1924) offerings. Whitney devoted much attention to foreign and domestic corporate loans and to other areas of the firm's business. Late in 1920, with Stettinius, he organized the underwriting group that distributed $28 million of General Motors stock for the financially pressed automobile concern, and in 1921 they planned a rescue operation that saved the Guaranty Trust Company from financial embarrassment. Whitney's experience in financing large enterprises made him a valued adviser to corporate executives, and like other Morgan partners he served as a director or trustee of many major American companies, including General Motors, whose board he joined in 1924. By the time of the 1929 stock market collapse, Whitney was a major leader of the Morgan firm. The crash and the banking crisis that followed it brought Whitney the public attention he previously had been able to escape. He testified before several congressional committees investigating Wall Street practices in the 1920's; meanwhile, he continued to work quietly and effectively behind the scenes, directing salvage operations that benefited not only his own house but the financial and business communities in general. Early in 1931, Whitney presided over the reorganization of Kidder, Peabody and Company, arranging the necessary loans to keep the firm afloat and advising the new partners during the difficult months of readjustment. The next year, with Lamont, he headed the bankers' group that devised the financial rescue plan that saved New York City from bankruptcy. The New Deal's banking and securities laws, particularly the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act's provision requiring the separation of commercial and investment banking, forced partnerships like the Morgan firm to choose between deposit banking and the securities business. The Morgan partners opted to remain a commercial bank. Whitney did much to reshape the firm's operations, and when the Morgan firm was incorporated as a commercial bank and trust company, he served as its president and chief executive officer (1940 - 1950) and then as its board chairman (1950 - 1955). He resigned as chairman in 1955 but stayed on as a director until April 1959, when the bank merged with the Guaranty Trust Company to form the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York. He was appointed chairman of the directors' advisory council of this company, a post he held until his death. Widely respected at home and abroad as a highly knowledgeable, effective, and responsible financier, Whitney suffered the pain and embarrassment of seeing his younger brother, Richard, a five-time president of the New York Stock Exchange, jailed for misappropriation of funds entrusted to him by clients of his brokerage firm. (He was not involved in his brother's activities. ) Whitney was president of the Harvard Board of Overseers (1949 - 1953). He also served as chairman and director of the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation and as a trustee of both the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. He was president of Doctors Hospital for sixteen years and a treasurer of the Episcopal Church Foundation. Whitney died in New York City.
On June 2, 1914, Whitney married Martha Beatrix Bacon; they had four children.