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Research v. Scandal. Like an expeditionary force, the House of Morgan had gone to Washington. In the Shoreham Hotel Morgan partners entrenched themselves in an entire wing of the eighth floor. A special barricade guarded night & day by plain-clothes men protected their redoubt from surprise attack. In the 40 rooms behind the barricade were staff headquarters, mess hall, recreation room, and the individual dugouts of the firm partners. Employes came & went all day long carrying dispatches from Manhattan. Files, records, ledgers filled one entire room, overflowed into the main living room. Thence with their staff of lawyers, headed by John W. Davis, the senior Morgan partners—Mr. Morgan, Thomas W. Lament, George Whitney, Russell Leffingwell, S. Parker Gilbert—sallied forth every day to the field of battle in the Senate Office building. Thither at evening they returned, to rest, confer, consult their records, see the Press, put on their dinner jackets, sit down to a pleasant evening meal together.
If the presence of the House of Morgan in Washington was like that of an expeditionary force, the witnesses before the Senate Committee looked more like survivors of the Grand Army of the Republic. Now a sedate old man with a front like Falstaff and a nose like Cyrano, J. Pierpont Morgan had been head of the House of Morgan for only 16 months when War broke in 1914. Next to him sat his No. 1 partner, slightly shrunken with age but still alert, Thomas W. Lament, who in 1914 was a junior in the firm. Third in line was a bowed, white-haired man whose motions showed the muscular uncertainties of age, who spoke in a quavering oldster's voice. He was Frank A. Vanderlip, who retired 17 years ago as president of New York's National City Bank. Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Robert Lansing, Henry P. Davison, who negotiated the House of Morgan's contract as purchasing agent for Great Britain, and Edward R. Stettinius, who was in charge of carrying out that contract, gave documentary testimony on a closed era from their graves.
Yesterday's scandal, like yesterday's news, is hard to revive. From the first the hearing took on the air of historical research rather than of a scandal hunt. Quickly Messrs. Morgan and Lament verified the list of their present partners, correcting two misspellings and crossing out the names of three who left the partnership four months ago. But when events of 1914 were called in question, answers took a different turn.
"I really don't know whether we discussed it," Mr. Morgan would reply with exasperating frankness. "That was 20 years ago, of course. I can't make up a memory."
"I think I had that impression at the time," quavered Mr. Vanderlip, "but I'm not certain. I don't remember what he said 22 years ago." When Senator Clark tried to pin the witnesses down with a "Don't your records show," Mr. Lamont would interrupt: "If I may say so, Senator, the only records that we have are an old file of cablegrams that have been in a warehouse in Brooklyn. We have no other records of the period."
Diggings. With Morgan & Co.'s cablegrams, and government files, the Committee proceeded to cover the chief facts of Wartime financing: