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Gruffly, naively, he voiced his credo for all to hear in the Pujo Committee ("Money Trust") hearings in 1912: "I have known a man come into my office and I have given him a check for a million dollars and I knew that he had not a cent in the world. But a man I could not trust could not get money from me for all the bonds in Christendom. . . . The first thing is character, money cannot buy it." And on that primitive rock of personal responsibility the House of Morgan built its power and fame, just as had the Rothschilds who financed the campaigns of Wellington, just as had the Fuggers of Augsburg who financed feudal Spain.
When panic struck New York in 1893, when 158 national banks went under and Coxey's Army marched on Washington, it was to Morgan that Wall Street turned for aid. So, reluctantly, did President Cleveland. It was Morgan who headed the syndicate that fattened the U. S.'s dwindling gold supply, Morgan who saved the Government from defaulting on a $12,000,000 check when the subtreasury across from "The Corner" had only $9,000,000 in gold in its vaults. There was profit in the rescue, but (more important) there was power.
It was also Morgan who set out to reorganize sick U. S. railroads. Within five years he controlled one-sixth of the railroad mileage of the U. S. and the "Morgan roads" were earning $300,000,000 a year, half the total of receipts of the U. S. Government. Monopolist, individualist, snorting foe of Government interference, he dragooned railroad men into verbal agreements (in his library or aboard his Corsair} on noncompetitive freight rates, forced mergers right and left. Biggest defeat of his career was by the Big Stick of Theodore Roosevelt, who smashed his Northern Securities Co., organized (after a historic battle with E. H. Harriman) to merge Northern Pacific, Great Northern and the Burlington. He lived to see the ICC end by public regulation the rate wars he hated. He died seven years too soon to see legislators change their minds to favor railroad consolidation.
Long before that day came, "Pierponti-fex Maximus" had reached out into industry, capped all his financial feats when he created the first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel. Meanwhile he merged Manhattan banks, planted their directorates with Morgan partners. In the crash of 1907 (he was then 71) Wall Street and the Secretary of the Treasury again leaned on his broad, round shoulders, followed his leadership in guaranteeing the deposits of weak New York trust companies. By no means the richest man of his age (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, others owned more) he was superior to any in sheer personal influence. Never the biggest bank in New York, by 1911 his house and its close associates did, in the estimation of John Moody, "practically control the financial destinies of America."