Background
John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. was born on September 7, 1867, in Irvington, New York, the second of four children and only son of John Pierpont Morgan, founder of J. P. Morgan & Company, and Frances Louisa Tracy.
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John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. was born on September 7, 1867, in Irvington, New York, the second of four children and only son of John Pierpont Morgan, founder of J. P. Morgan & Company, and Frances Louisa Tracy.
He was educated at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and at Harvard, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1889.
After a brief association with the Boston banking house of Jacob C. Roberts, Morgan, Jr. in 1892 became a partner in his father's firm.
A short apprenticeship in New York followed, after which he went to London to study banking in the firm of J. S. Morgan & Company, founded by his grandfather Junius Spencer Morgan, I. His eight years in London (1893 - 1901) gave him not only a knowledge of banking but also an affection for England that he retained for the rest of his life.
On the death of his father in 1913, he became the head of J. P. Morgan & Company. "Jack" Morgan - a nickname used to distinguish him from the elder J. P. - thus presided over the banking house during World War I. The firm's London and Paris connections made it a logical financial agent for the Allied governments. Through Morgan's initiative, it became the sole purchasing agent in America for the British and French; from early 1915 until the United States entered the war in 1917, J. P. Morgan & Company handled orders for more than $3, 000, 000, 000 worth of war supplies at a commission of 1 percent.
When President Wilson lifted the government's restriction on loans to belligerents in 1915, Morgan, Jr. , without compensation to his company, organized a syndicate of 2, 200 banks to underwrite a loan of unprecedented size: $500, 000, 000 of 5-percent bonds jointly guaranteed by Great Britain and France. Subsequent issues over the next two years raised the total to $1, 550, 000, 000. Morgan's association with the Allied cause brought an attempt on his life: in July 1915, at his estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, he was shot by a German sympathizer but escaped serious injury.
The postwar years found the firm's situation substantially changed. The war marked a shift in the financial headquarters of the world from Europe to the United States, the great creditor nation of the war. Thus the Morgan company's London connections were no longer as important as they had been. Moreover, the rapid growth of the postwar American economy, the increased needs of domestic and foreign borrowers, and the emergence of a mass public market for securities offerings created unparalleled opportunities for investment bankers. Other financial intermediaries soon entered the investment field, and as a result J. P. Morgan & Company under Jack Morgan did not enjoy the preeminent position it had under his father. Yet the house remained the acknowledged leader of American banking. Its power was based not on its resources, for it was not the largest bank on Wall Street, but on the quality of its clients, its reputation for fair and honest service, and the financial skill of the Morgan partners.
In the postwar period the firm carried on important work in foreign government finance, and Morgan, Jr. gained a reputation for recapitalizing national debts much like his father's for recapitalizing railroad debts. Between 1917 and 1926 J. P. Morgan & Company floated bond issues for Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Argentina, Australia, Cuba, Canada, and Germany, totaling about $1, 700, 000, 000.
Morgan, Jr. served at Paris in 1922 on a committee of bankers that sought to adjust German reparations, an important preliminary to the Dawes committee of 1924. He was an American delegate to the reparations conference headed by Owen D. Young in 1929 which created the plan for the Bank of International Settlements. J. P. Morgan & Company became that institution's American representative and floated its American shares; the firm also headed the syndicate that handled the American portion of the Young Plan loan, amounting to $98, 250, 000.
The Morgan bank sold about $4, 000, 000, 000 in stocks and bonds for American companies during the 1920's. About half of this amount consisted of railroad bonds, and another $1, 000, 000, 000 were the issues of public utility companies and public utility holding companies. Although by this time American companies had come to favor stock issues to bonds, only a little more than 3 percent of all the domestic securities the Morgan bank handled were common stocks.
Morgan, Jr. was abroad at the time the Wall Street panic marked the end of the economic boom of the 1920's, but his firm became a natural rallying point for the financial forces of the country. On October 24, 1929, representatives of five other banking institutions met in the Morgan offices with Thomas W. Lamont and formed a pool, estimated at from $20, 000, 000 to $30, 000, 000, with which they made an unsuccessful attempt to stem the panic.
During the 1930's both Morgan, Jr. and his firm were subjected to close governmental and public scrutiny. The United States Senate in 1933 investigated stock exchange abuses which contributed to and followed the crash. Questioning revealed that the Morgan firm and partners, though not guilty of the glaring abuses of many banking houses, had offered new stocks to selected persons at lower than market prices, and that Morgan, Jr. and his twenty partners, taking advantage of legal loopholes, had avoided paying any income taxes for the depression years of 1931 and 1932.
In 1936 Morgan, Jr. was called before Senator Gerald P. Nye's committee looking into the role of munitions makers in international relations. Nye maintained, without substantiation, that the United States had entered World War I to save the banker's loans and credits to Great Britain and France. Meanwhile, the Banking Act of 1933 had ordered a separation of investment and deposit banking, and the following year J. P. Morgan & Company withdrew from the investment banking field to become a private commercial bank. Although a number of the partners left and formed a new investment bank, Morgan, Stanley & Company, Jack Morgan, Jr. remained as head of the commercial bank.
Moreover Morgan, Jr. had a strong sense of philanthropic duty. He donated large sums to the Episcopal Church, in which he was an active layman. During World War I he gave $2, 000, 000 to the Red Cross, and he was known for his annual subsidy to the New York Lying-In Hospital. He continued to build the holdings of the Morgan Library in New York, begun by his father, and in 1923 transformed it from a personal collection into a permanent, endowed institution. Knowledgeable in art and literature, he donated art objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
By the mid-1930's Morgan, Jr. was devoting much time to his avocations, leaving the direction of the Morgan bank increasingly to other partners; it was incorporated in 1940. While on a fishing holiday in 1943, Morgan, Jr. died on March 13, 1943, of a cerebral stroke at Boca Grande, Florida, at the age of seventy-five. His ashes were interred in the family plot at Cedar Hill Cemetery, Hartford, where his wife had been buried in 1925.
John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. was a prominent financier and industrial organizer, one of the world’s foremost financial figures during the two pre-World War I decades. He reorganized several major railroads and consolidated the United States Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric corporations.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
An elitist, J. P. Morgan, Jr. maintained that any tampering with the free capitalist system and the leisure class which it supported would "destroy civilization. "
Morgan, Jr. was a member of the Jekyll Island Club (aka The Millionaires Club) on Jekyll Island, Georgia, as had been his father.
Those who knew John Morgan, Jr. well - and they were few - described him as generous and likable, a man of exceedingly high standards.
Tall and well-proportioned, Morgan, Jr. in later years came to resemble his father, although he was spared the bulbous nose and forbidding scowl. He was, according to one observer, "reserved to the point of brusqueness. "
On December 11, 1890, John Morgan, Jr. married Jane Norton Grew of Boston. The couple had five children, one of whom died in infancy.
John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. was an American financier and banker, who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation in the United States of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Anne Tracy Morgan was an American philanthropist, who provided relief efforts in aid to France during and after World War I and World War II.
Junius Spencer Morgan, I was an American banker and financier, who founded J. S. Morgan & Co. along with George Peabody.
Alice Morgan died in infancy.
Junius Spencer Morgan, III was an American banker and a director of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company.
Henry Sturgis Morgan, Sr. was an American banker, known for being the co-founder of Morgan Stanley and the President & Chairman of the Morgan Library & Museum.
