USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York, 1609-1909 > Part 46
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Mr. Morgan's maternal ancestry goes back to the Huguenot family of Pierpont (or Pierrepont), through James Pierpont of London, whose son John came to Massachusetts at an early date and settled in Roxbury, which town he represented in the General Court of Massachusetts in 1672. He was the father of Rev. James Pierpont, born in Roxbury in 1659, who was graduated from Harvard in 1681, became pastor of the church at New Haven, Connecti- cut, in 1685, and was one of the three ministers who formulated in 1698 the plan under which Yale was established in 1700. It was chiefly through his influence that Elihu Yale was induced to make his liberal gifts to the college, and Rev. James Pierpont was one of the original trustees of Yale. The grandson of this distinguished divine was also a clergyman, Rev. John Pier- pont, who had a notable career as a poet, and as an antislavery and temper- ance reformer; and was Mr. Morgan's grandfather.
Whatever psychological explanation of Mr. Morgan, based on heredity, the scientist may find in these and collateral lines of ancestry, there is no question as to the influence upon him of his father, Junius Spencer Morgan, who, after giving him a thorough education in the English High School in Boston and in the University of Göttingen, set him to practical work when he completed his studies in 1857. Mr. Morgan began in the banking business for
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three years with the firm of Duncan, Sherman & Company, in New York City. At the end of that time, in 1860, he started in business for himself and as American representative of his father's firm of George Peabody & Company, later J. S. Morgan & Company. This connection enabled him to give the federal government valuable assistance in the marketing of its securities in Europe. In 1864 he formed the firm of Dabney, Morgan & Company, and in 1871 he joined Anthony J. Drexel of Philadelphia, in the firm of Drexel, Morgan & Company in New York City and Drexel & Company in Philadel- phia. In 1893, when Mr. Drexel died, Mr. Morgan became senior partner, although for years before that he had directed the firm's business in New York City. On January 1, 1895, the style became J. P. Morgan & Company in New York and Drexel & Company in Philadelphia, as at present.
The services of Mr. Morgan in behalf of the government's finances have been called into requisition many times since the Civil War, notably in the floating of government bonds in 1876, 1877 and 1878, and in 1895, when his firm floated the $62,000,000 in gold bonds issued by the Cleveland adminis- tration to restore the normal treasury surplus of $100,000,000 and thereby save the treasury from a silver basis. One of the most important commis- sions executed by his firm for the general government was in connection with the payment to the French Panama Canal Company of the $40,000,000 pur- chase money for the canal. Mr. Morgan has also been the intermediary of foreign governments in obtaining American participation in bond subscrip- tion, and secured subscribers for $50,000,000 of the British War Loan in 1901: the largest foreign bond subscription ever made in the United States.
One of the many lines of activity in which Mr. Morgan has operated with distinguished success has been the reorganization of railroads, upon which branch he entered in 1869, when Jay Gould and James Fisk were contending for mastery in the railroad world, upon methods which often proved extremely disastrous to the properties and securities involved. One of the roads coveted by rival financiers was the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad, which Mr. Morgan quietly secured and put out of reach of further contention by leasing it to the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. A railroad reorganizer who was not a wrecker was something of a rarity in those belligerent days, but Mr. Morgan's work in that line then and since has always been in the direc- tion of rehabilitation or advantageous consolidation, and never destructive. In 1888 he successfully took hold of the tangled affairs of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and the "Big Four" System, and put them into good shape; and he performed similar good offices in 1891 for the Richmond Terminal, which he consolidated into the Southern Railway System to the great advan- tage of that section of the country. In 1895, when the Reading System had
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collapsed and appeared to be in rigor mortis, because of the over ambitious operations of its president, A. A. McLeod, Mr. Morgan resuscitated it and set it going again. He also reorganized the Erie System about the same time, and in 1896 took the New York and New England Railroad and leased it for a term of years to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. The Northern Pacific Railroad was in a bad way in 1897, but he took hold of it, secured the aid of German capital, brought opposing elements into harmony, and placed it on a solid basis. The Baltimore and Ohio and several other rail- road companies have been added to the list of those whose reorganization and rehabilitation have been planned and executed by Mr. Morgan, and the same is true with reference to street railway organizations, including the West End System of Boston, and the street railway system of Chicago. In ocean trans- portation also his genius for organization has benefited several important Atlantic and Gulf lines.
It is, however, in the field of industrial organization that his most note- worthy business successes have been achieved. He was concerned in the anthracite and bituminous coal interests, and in several other successful opera- tions of that kind, but it is his creation of the United States Steel Corporation which best attests his soundness of judgment and broadness of vision. He came into that by first being interested in the organization of the Federal Steel Company, which seemed a gigantic undertaking, and from that was led into the view that a much larger combination of interests was possible and desirable.
It is recognized in the financial world that no other man could have called together the resources necessary to the launching of so great an enterprise. Its original capital of a billion dollars (now increased to $1,400,000,000), put this corporation so high up in a class by itself that many predicted failure, declaring it could never succeed and that the stock would never reach a respectable figure. But Mr. Morgan saw, and he made others see, the possi- bilities of expansion in the steel industry, and the quotations of the Autumn of 1909 show that the market has come to realize how strongly, as well as how broadly, Mr. Morgan planned, when he and his associates launched "U. S. Steel" on the seas of industry and finance.
Mr. Morgan is not only at the head of the house of J. P. Morgan & Com- pany and Drexel & Company, but also of the London banking house of J. S. Morgan & Company, and the Paris house of Morgan, Harjes & Company. He has large investments in English securities, and his influence in European markets is very great. In the United States he has often demonstrated his power, in times of panic and financial stress, to stay the tempest and to tide over difficulties. This is because the world of finance is so well assured of the soundness of his judgment and the quality of his leadership that it looks
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to him for guidance in such exigencies. This has been time and again dem- onstrated, and never more emphatically than in the panic of 1907, when, because he had given his word, the Trust Company of America was saved, although $34,000,000 in cash was paid out over the counters before the run was ended. The meetings of leading financiers in his library resulted in measures by which the panic was subdued and restoration cautiously but surely commenced.
Great as is the prestige held by Mr. Morgan as a financier, a writer in The Nation a year or so ago stated that the day would come when his fame as a bibliophile would outshine his achievements in the world of finance. Though this can hardly be, it is yet a fact that in the collection of books, manuscripts, pictures and objets d'art, he has displayed genius and originality, with a boldness of attack and a broadness of vision comparable to those exercised in his great financial operations, and he is certainly, to-day, the foremost collector, as well as the premier financier, of the United States.
He owns many of the best and most valuable pictures, representing not only the old masters, but also works of the great artists of all the best modern schools. He has an art gallery of his own in London, besides being the pos- sessor of many great paintings in his home and library in New York. The catholicity of his taste and judgment as a collector has been exercised in numerous and divergent directions, including the purchase and gift to the American Museum of Natural History of the Bement Collection of mineral specimens, and the Tiffany Exhibit of gems and pearls, the Ford Collection of books and manuscripts given by him to the New York Public Library, and numerous paintings, porcelains and other art objects given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of rare books, manuscripts, paintings, porcelains and art objects he has a priceless collection, including the original manuscripts of many of the masterpieces of English literature, illuminated manuscripts of the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries, of which a partial yet wonderful exhibit was made in the Columbia University Library in 1906; and many rare speci- mens of ecclesiastic vesture and ornament dating from the early medieval period. In this connection, his purchase of the Ascoli Cope, and his generous return of it to the Church in Italy (from which it had been abstracted many years before), when the facts of its history became known, are fully remem- bered. His library is housed in a beautiful marble structure adjoining his New York home. Art in all phases has in Mr. Morgan a generous patron. He is the chief supporter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The New Theatre, opened in November, 1909, owes much to his personal interest and aid.
Mr. Morgan is one of the most active laymen of the Episcopal Church, and has for many years been a vestryman and warden of St. George's Church
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in New York City, and a strong supporter of the many branches of useful- ness and activity of that parish, under the rectorship of Rev. Dr. Stephen H. Tyng and his successors, and for more than twenty-five years has been a lay delegate to the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Among the objects benefited by his munificence are the Lying-in Hospital of New York City, to which he has given $1,350,000, covering the purchase of its present site and the erection and completion of its buildings; the Medi- cal College of Harvard University, to which he has given $1,250,000; also $500,000 each to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and to the New York Trade Schools; besides substantial donations to the Young Men's Christian Association, the Palisades Park Commission, Bronx Botanical Garden, Hart- ford Public Library, and many other educational, religious and charitable associations and objects.
Since 1881 Mr. Morgan has been prominent as a yachtsman, in which character he finds his most favored recreation. In that year he built the Cor- sair, an iron steam yacht, which was succeeded in 1891 by Corsair II, which was sold to the United States Government at the beginning of the Spanish- American War, and renamed The Gloucester, after which he built his present yacht Corsair III. Mr. Morgan was commodore of the New York Yacht Club for three years, and in that capacity he built the cup-defender Columbia, which twice defeated Sir Thomas Lipton's yacht Shamrock in the international races for the America's cup in 1899 and 1901.
Mr. Morgan's characteristics are those of skillful generalship in all of the manifold avenues of activity in which his interests and tastes have led him. His plans are in the large; and completely cover every campaign in which he figures, without burdening himself with the minuter details. His strategic skill has in no direction been more strongly manifested than in his remarkable faculty of choosing lieutenants capable of working to his plans.
He has received many honors, including the honorary degree of LL.D. from Yale University and decorations from foreign countries ; has been in inti- mate audience with the King of England, the German Kaiser, the King of Italy and other royalties, and with Pope Leo.
Mr. Morgan has a full appreciation of the social side of life, is a member of the best clubs of New York, London and other cities, and enjoys himself to a degree rarely attained by one so largely identified with great enterprises.
Mr. Morgan married first, in 1861, Amelia Sturgis, daughter of Jonathan Sturgis, of New York, who died in 1862; and in 1865 he married Frances Louise Tracy, daughter of Charles Tracy, a noted New York lawyer. He has a son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., who is associated with him in business, and three daughters: Louise Pierpont Morgan (Mrs. Satterlee), Juliet Pier- pont Morgan (Mrs. Hamilton), and Miss Anne Tracy Morgan.
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1905
COPYRIGHTED ST -DAVIS & SANFORD.
ANDREW CARNEGIE
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ANDREW CARNEGIE
A RECENT writer in the New York Independent said of Andrew Carnegie that he is "the most original and creative American of the last half century." Creative he certainly is, and original to a superlative degree, and no less emphatically is he American, notwith- standing the fact that he is a Scot. It was in ancient Dunfermline that he was born November 25, 1835; in Dunfermline, which was once proudest of the distinction of being the burial place of Bruce and other Scottish Kings, and the birthplace of Charles I, but now points with most pride to the fact that it is the birthplace of Andrew Carnegie.
His father was a weaver, for the linen industry has been the chief one in Dunfermline for about two centuries. The introduction of machinery in the 'forties made trouble for the weavers of Dunferm- line. Work was scarce, money scarcer, and the elder Carnegie became discontented. History is full of instances where Discontent has proved the turning point of Destiny for nations and for men. It drove the Carnegie family-father, mother and two sons, in 1848, via the barque Wiscasset, 800 tons, which made the voyage in forty-two days, to America.
Andrew Carnegie had attended school, when he could, in Dunfermline, but when the family settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and his father secured work in a cotton mill, he found a chance to work as a bobbin-boy in the same mill at a dollar and twenty cents per week, and he worked at that for a year, when the allurement of a fifty per cent. raise in salary made him relinquish that job for one as stoker for a furnace in a cellar at a dollar and eighty cents weekly.
Through the good offices of J. Douglas Reid, a telegrapher and an Edinburgh man, Andrew secured a position, when he was fifteen, as a telegraph messenger at three dollars a week. He was soon an operator at twice that salary, and by his enterprise and originality attracted the favor of Colonel Thomas A. Scott, then head of the Pennsyl- vania Railroad interest in Pittsburgh, becoming first a railroad oper- ator and afterward private secretary to Colonel Scott. That posi- tion placed him in touch with various opportunities, which he improved. The first was the chance that came to him to buy ten shares of Adams Express Company stock at sixty dollars per share. To get it, his mother mortgaged the little home in Allegheny (his father had died in 1855), and Colonel Scott lent him one hundred dollars to com- plete the purchase.
The success of this first investment venture was an encouragement to make others. He became a member of the syndicate which bought the Storey
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Farm, in the oil regions, in which the first year's dividends paid back the purchase money several times over. He became interested in the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company at its inception and made a consid- erable amount of money there. During the Civil War Mr. Carnegie served, in Washington, as Superintendent of Military Railways and Gov- ernment Telegraphs.
In 1863 Colonel Scott became vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Mr. Carnegie succeeded him as superintendent of the Pitts- burgh Division. He entered the iron business, May 2, 1864, by buying from Thomas N. Miller a one-sixth interest in the Sun City Forge Company, which made a specialty of axles, the other partners, besides Mr. Miller, being Andrew Kloman and Henry Phipps, and for about two years the business was very successful. Mr. Carnegie also organized the Keystone Bridge Company, and by disposing of stock to J. Edgar Thomson, president, Colonel Scott, vice president, and to other officials of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, secured it a strong position, so that it soon took a foremost place in the bridge industry. These enter- prises became so important that Mr. Carnegie left the employ of the railroad in 1865. He kept in touch with President Thomson, however, and when that gentleman became engaged in building a branch railroad to Davenport, Iowa, he engaged Mr. Carnegie to adjust some differ- ences connected with the sale of six million dollars worth of bonds in
Europe, and after he had successfully accomplished that mission, gave him some more to sell. His success in that enterprise gave him a sub- stantial increase of capital, and with partners he purchased land on the site of Braddock's defeat by the French and Indians in 1755, and there established and built the Edgar Thomson Steel Works. He built the Lucy Furnace in 1874, another Lucy Furnace (No. 2) in 1877, and bought out the Homestead Steel Works in 1880. He practically created, or at least led, the steel industry in this country, and so emphatic was his leadership in its wonderful growth as to maintain for him the prac- tical mastery of it up to the time that he retired from active par- ticipation in business. From the first his policy was the improvement and cheapening of processes so as to enable him to make steel quicker, better and at less cost, to adapt this material to more and more uses, and to make it in constantly increasing degree a staple of commerce. To this end machinery which had been deemed perfect was discarded when better became available, with an apparent recklessness which to many seemed scandalous; but this readiness to throw a good thing away to make room for a better kept him always ahead of all competition in the steel industry.
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From the time that Andrew Carnegie first saw a bessemer steel plant in full operation in England he was a confirmed optimist in reference to the future of the steel industry. Others wavered and doubted, but Mr. Carnegie never. He had the wisdom, however, to take advantage of the pes- simistic periods of his competitors, and to buy, to advantage, plants which had been established as rivals of his own. Thus his company acquired the Homestead plant in 1880, and the Duquesne plant in 1890. By com- bination with other interests, his two firms of Carnegie, Phipps & Company and Carnegie Brothers & Company acquired not only leadership in manufac- turing steel, but also control of the Frick Coke Company, the Scotia Ore Mines and other corporations related to fuel, raw material, transportation and other requisites to practical domination of the steel industry. In advancing to and maintaining that position there were countless problems to face, and many difficulties to overcome. The business was reorganized and consoli- dated in the Carnegie Steel Company in 1899.
In the Carnegian campaign for conquest of the Empire of Steel there were several division and brigade commanders, but Mr. Carnegie was always commander in chief. The employee who could show supreme ability in any special department was encouraged by the prospect of a partnership. Young men of inherent power rose with unprecedented rapidity, some from the humblest positions in the Carnegie employ, up the steps of promotion until they became partners, and over forty young men in the various departments reached the goal and became million- aires. In 1901 the United States Steel Corporation was organized and after much negotiation, Mr. Carnegie, then in his sixty-sixth year, con- sented to sell.
Mr. Carnegie retired from business when he sold out to the United States Steel Corporation, but he had only changed the direction and not the volume, of his activities. To retire, in the sense of becoming idle, would be an impos- sibility to one of his temperament. Therefore it is that Mr. Carnegie, released from business, has become more strongly identified with matters of public con- cern.
His philanthropies have been projected along the lines of adding to the intelligence of the English-speaking people. In his own childhood his opportunities for securing a formal education were much restricted. The chief asset he gained by his attendance at the Dunfermline schools was a love for reading. This he indulged to the fullest possible extent, and the difficulties which he found in securing the books he wanted so impressed him, that after achieving financial success he began providing library buildings, first in his home town of Allegheny, soon after in his native town of Dunfermline, later in Pittsburgh, and after that in any and every
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place in the United States or in the British Empire which showed a need for a library, and would provide for it a site and maintenance. He has given for this purpose over fifty million dollars for about two thousand library buildings, and is still providing libraries at a rate averaging one every other working day.
Besides libraries, Mr. Carnegie has given largely to educational pur- poses. He has helped many of the smaller colleges in various sums aggre- gating more than twenty million dollars; endowed the Carnegie Institu- tion, in aid of scientific research work, with $12,000,000; established the Carnegie Foundation, to provide pensions for retired professors, with $15,000,000; the Carnegie Relief Fund, for employees of the Carnegie Steel Company, $5,000,000; the Carnegie Hero Fund, $5,000,000; the Pitts- burgh Technical Schools, $5,746,000, the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, which includes Museum, Library and Art Gallery, exceeding $20,000,000; Scottish Universities, $10,000,000; for the Engineering Buildings, New York, built for the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Institute of Mining Engi- neers and Engineers' Club, $1,500,000; the St. Louis Public Library, $1,000,000; to New York City for branch libraries, $5,200,000, and Phila- delphia, $1,500,000, for thirty branch libraries; his aggregate gifts for library buildings for communities who are to maintain libraries by tax- ation being over $50,000,000, and has provided large sums for other pur- poses, his public benefactions exceeding $150,000,000, without including his private pension fund.
Mr. Carnegie is one of the world's most distinguished advocates of international peace, and furnished the fund of $1,500,000 for the building of the Temple of Peace at The Hague. He presided over the Inter- national Peace Conference held in New York City in 1907. He is, in fact, as distinguished for originality in his way of using his fortune as for the skill and rapidity with which he acquired it. The conven- tional story of the rise of a poor boy to wealth includes the phrase that the subject gave his "undeviating attention to his business," but that does not fit the career of Andrew Carnegie. That he had unprecedented suc- cess in business was not because he did not attend to other things. He went around the world over a quarter of a century ago, and he has made about ninety trips across the ocean. He holds a place of distinction as an author which many professional literary men might envy, and he gained the personal friendship of Herbert Spencer, John Morley, Mat- thew Arnold, Gladstone, John Bright and many other leading men of Britain and America, long before he had entered the rank of the millionaries.
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His two earliest books were the result of his travels, as indicated by their titles: "An American Four-in-Hand in Britain" (1883), and "Round the World" (1884). His next book, "Triumphant Democracy" (1886), has become a classic as an appreciation of American institu- tions. His later books, "The Gospel of Wealth" (1900), and "The Empire of Business" (1902), deal in an entirely original way with the subjects and problems suggested by their titles, and the last named has been translated into eight languages, including Greek and Japanese. Mr. Carnegie has also written and published a "Life of James Watt" for the "Famous Scots" series (1906), and "Problems of To-day" (1908) ; be- sides various contributions to magazines and reviews in America and Britain.
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