Morgan: American Financier.(Review)

Morgan: American Financier. By Jean Strouse. New York: Random House, 1999. 769 PP. Bibliography, photograph, references, and index. $34.95. ISBN 0375501665.

The period from the Civil War to World War I still fascinates us. It was, after all, an era of economic revolution, technological innovation and new ways of working, of great demographic shifts and social dislocation, of enormous wealth creation and profound moral confusion. Larger-than-life economic actors, people like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and, of course, John Pierpont Morgan, held center stage; it was they, the masters of industry and finance--and not the usual politicians, generals or religious leaders--who captured the public's imagination and personified the tenor of the times. They unleashed the "gales of creative destruction" that transformed the United States from a collection of prosperous (and lightly governed) agrarian communities into an even richer (and more regulated) industrial nation. They were admired for their great achievements, and ultimately blamed for the evils inherent in the new order of things.

In our own time we have the likes of Bill Gates, Jack Welch, and Michael Milken to wonder and worry about, and yet we can't seem to get enough of the great business magnates of the late nineteenth century. They resonate. Some bad reputations linger, but from the perspective of a century, we have begun to view the "robber barons" more sympathetically. In Maury Klein's Jay Gould (1986), for example, published at the height of the 1980s hostile takeover boom, "Mephistopheles" emerges as an important financial innovator, an agent of positive change against the stodgy status quo. Never mind that he perpetrated one deceit after another in pursuit of his ambitions--he was a useful catalyst in the quest for efficiency. Ron Chernow's recently published Titan (1998), seems more transparently present-minded. He presents the monopolist John D. Rockefeller as a kind of Bill Gates figure, a misunderstood organizer of a great new industry who manages to outfox his less efficient competitors, enrage self-righteous journalis ts, and attract unwanted (unwarranted?) political attention.

Such large historical actors are, of course, perfect subjects for biography, the most popular medium for conveying history to those who don't practice it for a living. For the professional historian, who looks for patterns in events and seeks to uncover the underlying causes and explain the overarching meanings of change, biography can be a tricky business. By its very nature, it particularizes. It reduces social phenomena to personal experience. For the biographer who seeks to investigate the development of personality, it takes great skill to link the particular to the general, the individual case to the larger social process.

The problem is heightened for economic historians, who seek to draw conclusions from large samples of data. In this sector of the historical discipline, great entrepreneurs pose a problem. They are too peculiar for great conclusions. (Institutional business historians concerned with the lives of corporations run the same risks of particularization.) A solution to this problem is to approach biography as Jonathan Hughes did in his influential set of essays, The Vital Few (1965 and 1986), in which the careers of great entrepreneurs become economic archetypes. (Alfred D. Chandler did the same for the "corporate biographies" of firms in Strategy and Structure [1960] and The Visible Hand [1977].) In this way, the individual cases served as vehicles for interpreting larger entrepreneurial and bureaucratic processes.

Still, one has to make room for great historical actors, indispensable individuals without whom it would be hard to imagine important historical outcomes. People make history, after all, and not just in the aggregate. Can one imagine that there were equivalent substitutes for the likes of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? For Thomas Edison or J.P. Morgan? Jean Strouse's Morgan: American Financier, makes the case for America's preeminent financial engineer. He is not, in her treatment of him, merely an exemplar of American capitalism. It is impossible to read the book and conclude that in his absence the American financial system could have developed as well or as fast as it did.

Strouse's main concern is with Morgan the person. It cannot have been easy. John Pierpont Morgan has always been an elusive subject for his previous biographers. When he departed this world, he took more of his secrets with him than seems proper for someone whose private career intersected importantly with public life virtually all throughout his adult life. (Morgan's destruction of most of his extensive correspondence with his father is the one act in his life for which not even the most sympathetic historian will forgive him.) Hence the cumulative works about him, though they have done a lot to explain Morgan's impact, have generally failed to penetrate his enigmatic charisma. In them he most often appears as a kind of prose cartoon, alternatively hero or devil, conspirator against the public interest or benign financial statesman. [*] After more than a decade of scouring archives in the U.S., England and Europe, and reviewing every old and new scrap of public and private information, Strouse does consider ably better. She pieces together a three-dimensional Morgan, animating him as never before. She uncovers the wellsprings of motivation for his vocation in finance and his avocation in art collecting. In the process, she dispels some hoary myths and presents new facts about his life, loves, and thoughts. She gets inside his head about as well as anyone possibly can, revealing Morgan's surprisingly fragile psyche with non-judgmental empathy.