(5 of 7)
¶ When the Anglo-French loan for $500,000,000 was sold in the U. S. in the autumn of 1915, Morgan & Co., worried for fear the bonds would not move as readily as they hoped, cabled Britain asking that British buyers of U. S. goods should urge U. S. firms with whom they did business to put money into the loan."
Said Senator Clark: "In the parlance of the Street you 'put the heat on these people so as to put over the loan."
Said Mr. Lamont : "We don't use that parlance in the Street. Naturally we did everything that was proper to assure the success of the loan. . . . We did not, as you have suggested, threaten anybody. That is not our way of doing business. We asked the munition makers to subscribe, and I think they took something like $88,000,000 of the loan."
¶ Prior to 1917, Morgan & Co. bought $3,000,000,000 worth of supplies for the Allies, purchasing from some 900 U. S. firms everything from rifles, shells and steel, to cotton, wheat, clothing and artificial limbs. A crisis arose in 1916 when Britain decided to cancel $55,000,000 worth of rifle orders with U. S. firms which had gone deeply into debt to build new plants. At the same time J. P. Morgan & Co. was about to float a $250,000,000 British loan in the U. S. After a long wrangle, Mr. Morgan finally joined Partner Davison in London, persuaded Prime Minister Asquith not to cancel the order. Counsel Raushenbush last week urged that this amounted to exacting a $55,000,000 pound of flesh from the British. Banker Morgan insisted that it was done in the interest of the British, whose prospective loan might well have been a failure if cancellation of the order had antagonized U. S. munition men and their backers.
Disgusted Press, Newshawks take it for granted that Senate investigations are conducted for their special benefit. In fact, there is a well-recognized technique: one scandal shall be brought out at the close of every morning hearing for afternoon headlines; another scandal shall be brought out at the end of every afternoon hearing for the next morning's papers. From the beginning of the Morgan hearings these scandals did not arrive as scheduled.
Alert Mr. Lamont, always ready to refute insinuations, several times turned the tables on the Senate Committee by offering Press accounts of the period to show that the things which Morgan & Co. was accused of doing in secret had been matters of public knowledge. Even Mr. Morgan, far from articulate and totally unable to answer questions so as to extract the sting of their insinuations, became in his blunt way a good witness for himself. When Partner Lamont, attempting to quote the Bible, referred to money as the root of all evil, Mr. Morgan, grinning an oldster's grin, corrected him: "The Bible doesn't say 'money.' It says 'The love of money is the root of all evil.' " When a Committee counselor suggested that men who were making money out of a foreign war naturally would not be sorry to see the U. S. enter, Mr. Morgan snorted: "Do you suppose that because business was good I wanted my son to go to war? He did, though."*