J.P. Morgan, The Pujo Committee, and the “Money Trust”

Like it or not, the broad influence of our best-known capitalists makes America unique (Donald Trump might say great). With the very real possibility of a billion dollar businessman landing in the Oval Office next year, we asked Professor Emeritus and biographer Charles Molesworth to reflect on a very different kind of powerful capitalist in

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American history, one who avoided public statements and hated publicity.

Sure, J.P. Morgan exploited a pre-regulation American economy, but he was also an avid art collector and played a major role in establishing the preeminence of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Charles Molesworth's new book The Capitalist and the Critic offers the first in-depth look at how Morgan and the headstrong English art history expert Roger Fry helped to mold the cultural legacy of the “encyclopedic” museum. In this blog post, Molesworth expands on his examination of J.P. Morgan, reflecting on issues that reverberate today: buying influence in a presidential race, breaking up too-powerful bank trusts, pushing Progressive Era initiatives to eliminate obscure and unfair trading practices, and the problem of "large sums of money resting in the hands of a few men."

Look for Charles Molesworth's piece in the New York Post this weekend.

J.P. Morgan, The Pujo Committee, and the “Money Trust”
By Charles Molesworth

In the last three decades of his life, J. Pierpont Morgan enjoyed unique pre-eminence as the nation’s most famous banker and its most demanding art collector. The latter distinction was burnished by his position as president of the Board of Trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The influence he exercised over the growth of the museum outstripped that of any other individual. Yet many of his artistic treasures resided elsewhere than the Met. His personal collections were housed in London and his other homes in England, and most impressively in his imposing self-named Library on Madison Avenue in New York, which was completed in 1906. The building served as the final testament to the fortune he had spent on paintings, sculpture, decorative objects-d’art, and rare books. His life as a banker, however, was not adorned with such a monument. His fame as a finance capitalist of international power and renown was instead to be spotlighted by a Congressional Committee which brought his banking style and practices briefly into the open.

Morgan was possibly the least well-known of America’s most famous men. Amassing an untold fortune – he was routinely referred to as the country’s wealthiest man – and redrawing the foundations of America’s industrial and financial workings somehow did not interfere with his inordinate desire for complete privacy. This desire was implemented not only by the power of his wealth, but because he wrote very little, and seldom made public statements. No one doubted the sway he exercised with stern willfulness, but many disputed whether or not he was a force for good. But on one dramatic and well-reported occasion, the public, and the prying eyes of reporters, caught more than a glimpse of what Morgan had adamantly tried to conceal. It would show what he thought of himself and his role in the system he built.

“The Pied Piper” cartoon expressed what Morgan’s detractors felt about his unchecked influence in the industrial and financial markets. Those “magnetized” by Morgan’s influence also included people from all sectors of society.

As he reached his seventieth birthday, Morgan had begun to spend more of his furious energy on the Metropolitan Museum, in part because his life as a financier was drawing to a close. Still, the final chapter was not to be finished until the pivotal event known as the Panic of 1907, when with immense leverage he called together the various bankers whose credit crisis was threatening everyone’s fortune. The rather lurid story of Morgan locking them all in his study (while he went off to play one of his countless games of solitaire) until they could agree on the necessary fiscal and monetary arrangements contained enough truth to be widely accepted. In fact it only added to his near-mythic identity. For some time Morgan himself had been acting like a Federal Reserve Bank, controlling the loans and liens that occurred between banks as part of the country’s economic system.

New York Post :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
By Josh Ozersky
Buy it Now

Cluck off!
KFC’s ‘Colonel’ was hardly a genteel man in a white suit
By LARRY GETLEN

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
by Josh Ozersky
University of Texas Press

Around 1930, Harland Sanders ran a Shell gas station in a rough section of Corbin, Ky. The station prospered despite the rough locale — he kept a gun under his cash register for protection — and intense competition from a man named Matt Stewart, who ran a Standard Oil station down the road.
The men’s mutual animosity grew as Stewart painted over one of Sanders’ signs, and Sanders responded by threatening to “blow [Stewart’s] goddamn head off.”
Sanders repainted his sign but got word that Stewart was painting over it again just as he was meeting in his office with two Shell supervisors. The three men — all armed — raced to the scene, and Stewart drew his weapon and fired.

One of the Shell managers was killed instantly and Sanders “jumped into the breach and under withering fire grabbed his fallen comrade’s gun . . . [and] the future Colonel unloaded with true aim and hurled hot lead into Stewart’s shoulder.”

Read more at nypost.com »