J. P. Morgan stepped into No. 23 Wall Street, the building known on every bourse in the world as "The Corner," on Feb. 23-Driving in from his great Matinicock estate at Glen Cove, Long Island, he came into the bank as usual at about 10:30 a.m. That evening he was on a Florida special, southbound for a rest. Early on the morning of the 25th he suffered a slight heart attack, walked from the train to a cottage of the Gasparilla Inn at Bocagrande, a tiny hamlet on a Florida key.
To his bedside went Dr. Henry Stewart Patterson, a first-rate New York heart specialist; Morgan's two daughters, Mrs. Paul G. Pennoyer and Mrs. George Nichols; his younger son, Lieut. Commander Henry Sturgis Morgan, 42. His elder son, Junius Spencer Morgan, 51, was out of the country on active naval duty, as he had been in 1917-18. Seventy-five-year-old John Pierpont Morgan died at 3:15 in the morning of March 13.
Had J. P. Morgan died in 1936 with the Nye investigation ringing throughout the land, he might have been written off as the international banker who got the U.S. into. World War I. But with U.S. industry, which Morgan & Co. had helped build to greatness, contributing on an unparalleled scale to another war, with Lend-Lease giving to Britain more aid than the bankers 29 years ago dreamed possible, his place in history had changed.
This week J. P. Morgan was buried at Middle Village, Queens, New York. With him the U.S. laid away not so much an era as a great misinterpretation of an era.
No Buccaneer. The U.S., for two decades, had largely believed in a fairy story, of Marxist origin—the legend that international bankers sucked the nation into a war which was none of its business, that U.S. participation in that war had been a mistake, which must never be repeated. The work of the Nye committee, the defaulted war debts, the failure of the League of Nations, the legend of the "Merchants of Death" all made for disillusionment, and out of that came the national attitude of cynicism toward the world, expressed as isolationism.
A great part of that legend was associated with the position of the House of Morgan. The legend began with the elder Morgan, John Pierpont (Maximus), a Hartford boy who went down to New York to do battle with Fisk and Gould, to trade with Vanderbilt for the control of U.S. railroads, to integrate U.S. industry through the power of finance.
The J. P. Morgan who died last week was not of that breed. A tycoon by inheritance, he was not a buccaneer by nature. Born in 1867 at Irvington-on-Hudson, at the beginning of his father's career, "Jack" Morgan was brought up in a genteel tradition, educated at St. Paul's School and Harvard, served a turn in his father's expanding firm, in 1898 departed for London.
Eight years in London had a profound effect on the younger Morgan. They made him a conservative banker, interested in doing a safe deposit and security business. And they gave him an undying loyalty to England.
Morgan Lend-Lease. That loyalty served the U.S. well. In 1913 Morgan the elder died in Rome, and Jack Morgan took over. There was never any question where the Morgan sympathies lay. Testifying long afterwards before a Government committee, Mr. Morgan said: "We find it quite impossible to be impartial as between right and wrong."