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When Morgan died he was by no means the richest man in the U.S. His estate is certainly well under $50,000,000, of which perhaps $5,000,000 represents his share in the firm. Whether his sons will come back into banking at war's end remains to be seen. But certainly they will come back to a new world. The war may not restore the glories of J. P. Morgan & Co., but to a peculiar degree it has re-established certain principles for which the firm was famous. Its international position — that, whatever came, the U.S. and Britain must stick together — has already been justified. And the Morgan philosophy of domestic expansion is in better estate than two years ago.
What the '305 proved was that the U.S. must have strong government, that government is a "career" in itself (as it has always been in England) and cannot be managed by businessmen with their left hands. In this sense the economy will perhaps never again be dominated by private organizations such as the House of Morgan, and never should be.
But the notion is on the way out that Washington by itself can rehabilitate the postwar world. The Export-Import Bank is no substitute for fruitful private loans in South America; Government spending is no substitute for a strong, healthy private capital market. In this sense the death of J. P. Morgan marked not so much an end as a return and beginning.
In 1933 Morgan and his partner, Russell Leffingwell, submitted a valedictory to the Pecora Committee. It said: "Looking back it is easy to see the errors that were made. It is easy to see that our super-prosperity from 1914 to 1929 grew out of the war itself, and out of the maladjustments which the war left behind it. Yet while we were living through the period it seemed that with effort, forethought and courage we were going to be able to build a better world; that our Federal Reserve System created in 1914 had put an end to the banking panics which had periodically arrested every previous era of prosperity in modern history; that, possessed of a great continent with all the climates and all the natural resources, inhabited by an adventurous and hardy and industrious people; with the extraordinary development of communications, of telephone and telegraph and radio, of motor cars and of roads, electrical power, and all the manifold extensions of human activity; we had indeed entered upon a new phase in the life of the American people."
No postwar planner can settle for a lesser vision.