Money and Power Part 3

"It only remains for us to congratulate the enterprising and liberal spirits who conceived and executed a work at once so useful and so great, and the country which is to enjoy its golden and perennial fruits," the editorial concluded. 'A more pleasant duty we have rarely had to perform."

If only, in fact, it had been that simple. Historic, yes and beyond doubt one of the most important achievements of the century, for America and the world. But when it came to the princ.i.p.als involved, the Evening Star sugar-coated the story almost to the point of non-recognition. Behind the railroad and its completion lay a rogue's gallery of colorful characters. Audacious tasks, it turns out, require audacious people, and the Transcontinental Railroad would bring them out in droves.

The story of the Transcontinental Railroad begins with geography and ends in greed and profit. By the mid-nineteenth century America was a divided country politically: Climate, the nature of the soil, immigration patterns, economic interests, slavery and much more had driven a wide wedge between North and South. But the United States was a country divided by its own vastness as well. East of the Mississippi was a nation that had grown up largely under English tutelage. On the West Coast sat a second America, born under Spanish rule and only now being anglicized, in large part by the influence of the prospectors and other easterners who had rushed to California during the 1849 gold craze. Until the s.p.a.ce between the regions could be closed and settled, the United States was united in name only, whatever the resolution of the political schism might be.

Crossing and closing that larger continental divide would make a handful of men immensely rich, and riches are what got them into the project in the first place. But before there was greed, there was idealism. Visionary nationalists like Asa Whitney had been urging a transcontinental railroad since the 1840s, almost from the moment that the great age of the American railroad was born. Egged on by Whitney and others, Congress had been debating the subject for two decades before the first piece of transcontinental track was ever laid down.

The hard rock that the railroad idealists kept running up against was politics. Northern interests envisioned a route that began in Chicago as most convenient to the industrial and population centers of the northeast and headed west through the Dakotas. Southern interests wanted Atlanta to be the eastern terminus of a line that would follow the trail eventually blazed by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. A central route backed by the powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, great-uncle to the famous artist of the same name, would take off for the west from Omaha, running along Nebraska's Platte River Valley.

By 1862, when a package of federal loans to fund the Transcontinental Railroad finally cleared Congress, the choice had been simplified the secessionist South no longer had a say or a vote in the matter. The Civil War gave a boost to the project in another way, just as the Cold War a century later would provide a rationale for funding the Interstate Highway system: Rather than just serve the purposes of settlement and commerce, the Transcontinental Railroad was now essential for the national defense, to a.s.sure the easy movement of troops and supplies. Presented with the funding and asked to choose among the remaining possible routes, Abraham Lincoln sided with Benton and his central route, and the railroad was ready to begin its westward march. (Lincoln, who owned several pieces of real estate in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri from Omaha, was careful to acknowledge his own selfinterest in the selection.) By then, too, the greatest impediment to the eastward movement of the railroad out of Sacramento had been solved by another of the Transcontinental's dreamers, as opposed to its schemers. Born in Connecticut and trained as a civil engineer in New York before migrating to California, Theodore Judah had set himself the monumental task of finding a practical way to move tracks and trains out of the Sacramento Valley, up the Sierra Nevadas, and back down again into Nevada and Utah beyond. For month upon month, Judah trekked through the High Sierras until he found the perfect solution in perhaps the most infamous terrain in all of the mountain range: Donner Pa.s.s, where during the brutal winter of 1846-1847, a group of settlers had fallen victim to starvation and cannibalism while trying to reach California.

Soon thereafter, Theodore Judah would mention both his route and the use he foresaw for it during a chance encounter with Collis Huntington, and with that, anything that remotely resembled idealism would pretty much disappear from the picture.

Also Connecticut-born and New York raised, Collis Huntington had a genius for making money. A pushcart salesman in his youth, he'd come west with the Gold Rush, but instead of digging and panning for gold, he ended up selling prospectors the shovels and picks they needed to do the work, a far more certain source of profit. By 1861, Huntington was running a prosperous hardware company in Sacramento, with Mark Hopkins. Then Theodore Judah wandered into the store, and Collis Huntington knew he was staring opportunity in the face.

He and Hopkins recruited two other partners: Leland Stanford, who had failed as a lawyer back East and was in partners.h.i.+p with his brothers a few blocks away in the wholesale grocery business, and Charles Crocker, who had come west in 1849 to find gold and, failing that, had set himself up as a drygoods merchant, also in Sacramento. Together, the four men put up $24,000 to form the Central Pacific Railroad corporation and began their ride to fortune and what a ride it would be.

Collis Huntington's fortune eventually would grow to something on the order of $70 million, built not just on trains, but on timber, coal mines, steams.h.i.+p lines, and Southern California real estate as well. Rail, though, remained his fortune's fount and his own first love. By the mid-1890s Huntington was able to travel entirely on track he owned from his mansion on San Francisco's n.o.b Hill to Newport News, Virginia, which he had founded as the deep-water terminus for another of his investments, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. Near the end of his life, he bought a summer camp in New York's Adirondack mountains and had a 26-mile railroad spur built so that the camp would be easier to reach from a Fifth Avenue mansion he also owned in Manhattan. In time, his heirs would use the fortune to fund the renowned Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Huntington's original partner, Mark Hopkins, was the first of the four to die, in 1878, but not before he and his wife also built a mansion on n.o.b Hill with a drawing room modeled on a chamber of the Palace of the Doges, a dining room capable of seating sixty, and a master bedroom done up in ebony with ivory inlay. Today, the Mark Hopkins Hotel has appropriated his name and sits on that site.

Another n.o.b Hill resident, Leland Stanford his and Hopkins' mansions sat side by side would leave more lasting legacies. Stanford became the chief financial backer of the California Street Cable Railway (parent to the cable cars that still amuse San Francisco tourists) in the 1870s. He also served eight years in the U.S. Senate, until his death in 1893, and of course he founded the university that bears the name of his son dead at age 15 and that has helped, at least in part, to polish a reputation not notable in its time for generous public acts. (In his charming history of the Central Pacific's founders, Big Four, Oscar Lewis notes that in 1894 Arthur McEwen had suggested that the arch above the entrance to Stanford University should read: "With Apologies to G.o.d.") Charles Crocker also built a mansion on n.o.b Hill this one of redwood, at a cost of $1.25 million, with a 76-foot tower for the views. Like Huntington, he also would spread his interests into coal, banking, local real estate, and irrigation development in the San Joaquin Valley. Like all the partners, too, he was part of a world that freely flowed between commerce and government: Crocker's brother served as chief justice of the California Supreme Court during Leland Stanford's term as governor. But Charles Crocker more than any of the others had been involved in the day-to-day management of the Central Pacific in its early years, and he never stopped keeping a close eye on the enterprise. Always overweight and subject to medical problems, he went into a diabetic coma in August 1888 and died at the new resort hotel at Del Monte that the railroad had only recently completed at his urging. His estate was said to be worth $40 million.

Getting so rich, though, would take both time and work. Spurned by the money interests in the city they would eventually lord it over San Francisco and rebuffed by the legislature of the state Leland Stanford would soon governCalifornia-the new Central Pacific partners laid siege to the one place most capable of providing the millions of dollars they needed to begin laying rail toward the East: the United States Congress. And in the Was.h.i.+ngton of 1862, they were wellequipped for the challenge. All four had had a hand in launching the Republican Party in 1856, after the collapse of the Whig movement; and Hopkins, Stanford, and Crocker each had stood for either local or state office under the party's banner in its first years. In 1860, only four years after the party was founded, Republicans had managed to elect their first president, Abraham Lincoln. Born in abolitionist sentiment, the Republican Party also fit the spirit of the moment, at least until the war seemed to be going badly for the Union side. And in TheodoreJudah, the Central Pacific crowd had not only a bold thinker but a man who brought an engineer's thoroughness to the business of lobbying.

With the help of Aaron Sargent, a newly minted California congressman with long ties to Huntington, Judah was appointed secretary of the Senate committee that was considering the Railroad Act. Soon he added, via a clerks.h.i.+p on the relevant House subcommittee, the position of clerk of the main House committee charged with the bill, and by then he was, in effect, writing large chunks of the legislation he was advocating. The debate that ensued was long and the opposition strong even despite the national defense imperative and the voluntary removal of the southern-route proponents but on July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed the act, designating the Central Pacific to begin building the Transcontinental Railroad east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific to start building west from Omaha. Both corporations were granted what were to prove highly valuable rights of way from the federal lands they would pa.s.s through, and both were given access to government loans, payable over 30 years at 6 percent interest, for up to $48,000 per mile of track laid, depending on the terrain.

"We have drawn the elephant," Theodore Judah wired back to San Francisco as soon as the act was signed. "Now let us see if we can harness him up."

That task, though, would fall largely to others. Judah was on his way back to the East Coast from San Francisco in October 1863, sailing on the steamer St. Louis, when he contracted yellow fever during a land crossing in Panama. A little less than two weeks later he was dead, still short of his 38th birthday. At least he wouldn't live to witness the rapaciousness of the men who completed the job he had helped to start.

What Collis Huntington was to the Central Pacific Railroad its dynamo, the one who traveled the length and breadth of the East, making arrangements with the foundries for more rail, staving off the bankers when the funding got perilous as it frequently did in those early years, b.u.t.tonholing congressmen for more loans, and bribing them when all else failed Thomas C. Durant was to the Union Pacific.

He had lobbied as hard as the Central Pacific had for the franchise to lay rail west from Omaha, and like the Central Pacific, he had papered Congress with favors. (Free rail travel seems to have been standard issue for congressmen in those days, and many of them such as the powerful Pennsylvania senator Thaddeus Stevens, who owned an iron foundry had a vested interest in the outcome in any event.) But whereas Huntington and his group appear to have had some vestiges of conscience, or at least a trace of concern about how history might view them, Durant was largely untroubled on both scores.

Officially, he held the t.i.tle of vice president of the Union Pacific, but anyone in or out of the company knew that he was the Union Pacific. To the men who worked for him, Durant was a tyrant. His style of management, it's said, consisted largely of issuing a constant barrage of directives, most of them insulting, and often demanding that something be done immediately that could barely be done at all. When he couldn't pay his workers and he often couldn't, or wouldn't he would bully them to keep at the job. When they balked at that, he'd threaten to replace them on the spot.

To himself, though, Thomas Durant was the soul of generosity, and nowhere more so than in the matter of the Credit Mobilier of America. Having secured the right to lay the rail, Durant set up Credit Mobilier he borrowed the better part of the name from a French corporation as an independent construction company and then subcontracted the entire job out to his creation, which in turn charged Union Pacific outrageous rates for the work it was performing.

Like Collis Huntington, who went to bed many nights in the mid- and late 1860s wondering where the Central Pacific would find the next million dollars to meet its debts, Thomas Durant went to bed many nights aware that the Union Pacific was all but bankrupt. Durant, though, was the one who was helping to bankrupt his company, and the Credit Mobilier gave him an added advantage: When the going got tough, he could sprinkle heavily discounted shares in his creation over Congress in lieu of hard cash. Whatever the financial health of the Union Pacific, it was no secret that Credit Mobilier was going great guns.

And still the work got done. More than fifteen months elapsed after Abraham Lincoln signed the Railroad Act before the Central Pacific laid its first section of rail surveying had to be completed, crews and managers brought on board, and the rail secured and brought in place. Another two years would pa.s.s before the company had laid its first 55 miles of track. Theodore Judah's route was the right one, but it still meant blasting tunnels and creating rail beds through the unyielding, unforgiving rock of the Sierra Nevadas.

Labor was a problem as well. What able-bodied men California had could generally make far better wages working in the mines and elsewhere. To fill the ranks, the Central Pacific turned to China, ultimately importing some twelve thousand workers from Canton province. The men more than half were, in fact, teenagers earned $30 a month laying rail. For much of the time, they camped alongside the track as they went, no easy ch.o.r.e in the dead of winter.

"When the snow got so bad, usually they would live beneath [it]," David Haward Bain, author of Empire Express, told television interviewer Brian Lamb. "They would just carve out entire galleries underneath the snow and live there for months at a time."

Amazingly, they were well provided for, Stephen Ambrose writes in his history of the Transcontinental Railroad, Nothing Like It in the World. The Cantonese dined on oysters, cuttlefish, bamboo sprouts, seaweed, mushrooms, and many other delicacies reminiscent of the homes and farms they had left all dried and sent out from Chinese merchants in San Francisco. Unlike their American-born counterparts, the Cantonese also bathed regularly, and although they smoked opium on Sundays, they mostly stayed away from alcohol. The white worker "has a sort of hydrophobia which induces him to avoid the contact of water," one observer of the work gangs noted, whereas "the Chinaman is accustomed to daily ablution of his entire person."

Working out from the western edge of the settled nation, the Union Pacific had a larger labor pool to draw from. Irish immigrants did much of the early work, joined by hardened veterans as the Civil War drew to a close. Until they reached the Rockies, the Union Pacific workers did not encounter the challenging terrain of their compet.i.tors they laid rail far faster, at far less revenue per mile but they paid for the flatter land in parching summer temperatures, bitter winter winds, and vulnerability to Indian attacks. None of the mileage, on either side, came easy.

By 1866, the two railroads collectively were the biggest employers in the United States, with twenty thousand men on their payrolls. By mid-1868, the Union Pacific had crossed the Rockies and was racing across Wyoming. In April, the company had laid track across Sherman Summit: At 8,242 feet, it would be the highest elevation either company conquered in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Not long after, Union Pacific took the railroad across the Dale Creek chasm with a 700-foot-long bridge built of wood, 126 feet above the stream bed, one of the great engineering feats of the century and done almost on the fly.

To the west in Nevada, Charles Crocker had vowed that his crews would lay a mile of track a day during 1868, and they almost made it, falling only three miles short. By now, the workers were living in boxcars that rolled along with the railhead. At stake for both railroads was the lion's share of the rail traffic in Brigham Young's prosperous Mormon community in Utah, which was expected to swell with European settlers once the railroad was open. To hedge the Central Pacific's bet, Leland Stanford spent much of the fall and winter in Salt Lake City courting Young. As 1869 dawned, they were addressing each other as "Brigham" and "Leland."

On April 10, 1869, the government finally set a meeting point for the two companies: a desolate spot in the Utah mountains called Promontory Summit, six miles west of Ogden. With more than sixteen hundred miles and some six years of labor behind them and only a collective one hundred miles left to go, men began to work around the clock, performing what seem, in retrospect, astounding feats: Even with dynamiting through rock to make the beds, crews were laying ten miles of track in a single day. Not everything got done right the Central Pacific crew left some weird z-shaped tracks behind them for later railroad crews and railroad barons to worry about but the job did get done. America was too anxious to be joined coast to coast to dawdle.

May 10, 1869-a month to the day after the meeting point had been set broke clear in Promontory Summit, and cold enough that the one watery street in town was frozen solid. Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins were there to represent the Central Pacific. (According to Oscar Lewis's account, Collis Huntington would later say that Stanford's total contribution to the Transcontinental Railroad consisted of turning over the first shovelful of earth and driving in the last spike, which, incidentally, he missed on the first swing.) Having just been released on payment of a $253,000 ransom, against an initial demand of $2.5 million, Thomas Durant was there for the Union Pacific side. (The best guess and one certainly consistent with his character is that Durant engineered his own abduction in order to secure the money necessary to pay off a contractor, who in turn made sure to feather Durant's own nest.) Durant missed on his first swing, too, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the Chinese and Irish laborers who had brought the track to this final union. Other dignitaries on both sides followed with their swings, often askew, and then the chief engineers finished the job, the continent was spanned with iron, and the officials could repair to Durant's gleaming Pullman car to recover before a luncheon aboard Stanford's car. As they did so, two locomotives, one representing each of the railroad companies, moved cautiously forward and touched cowcatchers to commemorate the moment. ("What was it the engines said," Bret Harte wondered in his Overland Monthly, "Pilots touching head to head.") It was aboard Thomas Durant's car that the Union Pacific's head engineer, Grenville Dodge, composed his moving telegraphic tribute to Abraham Lincoln under whose administration the railroad had begun "in the middle of a great rebellion" and to Ulysses Grant, Dodge's friend and fellow general from the war years, who had "conquered the peace." Dodge had been Theodore Judah's counterpart: Just as Judah had discovered the Donner Pa.s.s route through the Sierra Nevadas, the rugged, self-sufficient Dodge had found the route that carried the Union Pacific through the Rocky Mountains. The experience served him well, and not just for plotting track: A few years later, he was able to use his intimate knowledge of the newly opened American west to elude a process server who had chased him from Texas to St. Louis. Dodge, for whom Fort Dodge in Iowa is named, lived out his later years in a Victorian mansion in another Iowa city, Council Bluffs. He was said to be the richest man in the state, but like everyone a.s.sociated with the Transcontinental Railroad, his reputation would forever be tainted by the Credit Mobilier scandal. What it was possible to turn away from while the great project was underway became harder to ignore once the dust had settled.

Congress had been in the thick of the scandal, too: Credit Mobilier stock had papered the place. To purge themselves, lawmakers scheduled a series of hearings meant, in theory, to bring the culpable among their own numbers to justice. Certain of how the hearings would turn out in practice, the New York Sun ran its account of the proceedings under the sardonic banner: "Trial of the Innocents." It wasn't quite that. Schuyler Colfax, who had been Speaker of the House while the railroad was being built and who had gone on to become Grant's vice president, fared poorly in the testimony, and two congressmen were censured, including Oakes Ames, who had been at the forefront of offering his colleagues steeply discounted shares in Credit Mobilier.

Doc Durant, who had been in on the creation of Credit Mobilier of America, escaped the legal consequences, but history caught up with him all the same. Wiped out by the succession of bank failures that launched the Panic of 1873, Durant tried to bounce back with an ultimately unsuccessful scheme to develop the iron and timber resources of the Adirondacks. He died there, half forgotten and far from rich, in 1885, 16 years after he had had the honor of driving in the final spike at Promontory Point.

Great acts are the fruit of great vision, not necessarily of great or moral people, but whatever America got cheated out of by the men who built the Transcontinental Railroad, she got back a thousand times over. Transportation was, of course, changed forever. The day the final spike was driven into the railroad in Promontory Summit, Wells Fargo, taking advantage of the almost completed track, had promised in a New York Times ad: "Seven days travel from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean," with only a single day's stagecoach riding. Soon, though, you could go all the way from New York to the West Coast in a week. On the iron horse instead of behind the real one mult.i.tudes could ride and bring their worldly possessions with them. And did they ever.

In the 18 years between the pa.s.sage of the Railroad Act of 1862 and the U.S. Census of 1880, California's population grew 128 percent, to 865,000. Nebraska's population grew more than threefold between 1860 and 1870; Nevada's grew sixfold during the same time. Colorado had a bare 40,000 residents in 1870; by 1880 it had nearly 200,000. And Brigham Young had been right, too: Deseret, his promised land in the desert that became Utah, nearly doubled in population in the 11 years after the two railroads were finally joined there.

It wasn't just population that grew though. Rail begat rail, as the spider web of tracks that had characterized the eastern half of the nation before the Civil War came to characterize the nation as a whole. In 1869, a little more than four thousand miles of track were laid down across the country; three years later, by 1872, track was being laid down at the rate of nearly seventy five hundred miles a year. In all, railroads operated some fifty-three thousand miles of track in 1870; a decade later, they were running on more than ninety-three thousand miles of track, triple the figure only two decades earlier. The people tilled the new land and put up fences and mined the rich mountain mineral deposits, and the trains carried their grains and livestock and ore back East, where exports could be s.h.i.+pped overseas to the Old World that had lent much of the money to build the Transcontinental Railroad.

And it wasn't just trains and rail and commerce that expanded. It was att.i.tude also. America had always been a place that promised wide open s.p.a.ces. Now the wide open s.p.a.ces were closer and easier to get to than they had ever been. In Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Thomas Durant the men who had conquered the continent there was also the promise that a man could go as far as his ambition would carry him, if only he was ruthless enough.

J. PIERPONT MORGAN.

The American Colossus Y THE TIME ITS HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY ROLLED around, America was ready to celebrate. The war had been over for more than a decade. The two coasts had been joined by rail seven years earlier, opening the vast western reaches of the nation for economic exploitation. Within six more years, another three railroads the Northern Pacific, the Southern Pacific, and the Santa Fe would join the Union Pacific and Central Pacific in offering service between the Midwest and the West Coast. If not empowered, African Americans were at least free. The great moral taint of slavery had begun to lift from the land. And after the twin shocks of the Panic of 1873 and the depression that followed, business was starting to boom again.

Government spending during the Civil War had brought rapid growth to the Northeast. Now, the good times were ready to spread out across the land. Oil speculators poured into western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Coal was leaving the ground as fast as men and machinery could extract it. Silver and gold mines opened in Colorado and throughout the Rocky Mountain states and territories. With markets growing for their products and with the means of transport readily at hand, manufacturers began to multiply their output. An 1869 government report declared: Within five years more cotton spindles had been put in motion, more iron furnaces erected, more iron smelted, more bars rolled, more steel made, more coal and copper mined, more lumber sawn and hewn, more houses and shops constructed, more manufactories of different kinds started, and more petroleum refined and exported, than during any equal period in the history of the country.

In fact, the party was just getting under way. As they had since the start of the Industrial Revolution, scientific progress and human prosperity seemed to be marching together. "Ninetenths of the uncertainties [of making steel] were dispelled under the burning sun of chemical knowledge," Andrew Carnegie declared. Soon, railroads would be the prime supplier of the ore from which steel was made, the prime mover of the finished product, and the prime consumer of that product, too: a formula for unbridled prosperity for both parties.

On July 4, 1876, and during the weeks that followed, the nation celebrated its centennial by gathering in the city where its Founding Fathers had met to launch this bold experiment in democratic capitalism. And like the nation that had grown up in the 100 years since, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was huge. Two hundred fifty-six acres of Fairmount Park were enclosed by fence for the event. Patrons and ten million of them, a quarter of the nation's population, showed up paid 50 cents each to enter through 13 gates, one for each original colony. Inside were 190 separate buildings, a full 50 acres under cover. The main building alone was three times the length of Grand Central Station and boasted 11.5 miles of aisles. Walking the whole exposition, from building to building and down all the aisles of each, meant wearing out 25 miles worth of shoe leather. For patrons who tired, a narrowgauge railroad circ.u.mnavigated the grounds. France contributed 700 paintings to the art exhibition in Memorial Hall. Queen Victoria of England sent along a napkin she had woven to be shown in the Woman's Pavilion. At the center of Machinery Hall stood a twin, 2,500-horsepower Corliss engine, more than 40 feet tall, weighing over 600 tons, and capable of powering some 8,000 gadgets scattered around the hall.

In all, the Centennial Exposition painted a portrait of a nation about to step into its greatness. Across the Atlantic, though, a different picture prevailed. To continue growing, the U .S. economy needed capital investment, yet to most investors in Europe, where the great majority of wealth still resided, the New World of the mid-to-late 1800s seemed much closer to the Third World of today, filled with immense opportunity and with immense risk, each in equal and unsettling measure. Tainted by Credit Mobilier and other scandals, American businessmen had about them the general odor of unreliability, well earned in many cases. America itself remained deeply in debt, still crippled by the cost of waging a war to preserve the union. With nothing approaching the Federal Reserve system of today, American banking was also inherently unstable, subject to a cyclical barrage of panics, bank runs, inflation, and depression.

Investment is never without peril, but unless investors have reason to trust the probity and wisdom of those they are entrusting their money to, they are not likely to crack their wallets very far. As Cosimo de' Medici had shown four centuries earlier, reputation counts, and in the late nineteenth century, no figure in American finance had a more towering reputation than J. Pierpont Morgan, known to friend and foe alike as 'Jupiter" ruler of the skies, the biggest of the big. Without ever holding a government t.i.tle, J.P. Morgan would preside over a ma.s.sive transfer of capital from Europe to the United States, and without ever manufacturing a thing, he would help create the modern industrial economy. In the twilight of his years, he would even rescue the New York Stock Exchange, virtually on his own.

For all that has been written about him, John Pierpont Morgan continues to resist definition. He was a pillar of the Episcopal Church, and a generous supporter of good causes. In life, he had subsidized a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer and much more he gave half a million dollars to the church in 1892 alone. He read the Bible by himself, and busied himself with church policy. At the end, he reaffirmed his piety (and his self-confidence) in a will that famously began: "I commit my soul into the hands of my savior in full confidence that having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood, He will present it faultless before my heavenly father...." The Pope himself expressed great distress at Morgan's death in Rome, in March 1913, after he had fallen gravely ill in Cairo. And yet, even if he was a G.o.d of money, 'Jupiter" Morgan was no saint.

His first wife had been Amelia Sturges, the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant and arts patron. They were both 20 when they fell in love in New York City in 1857. Four years later they were married in her parents' parlor; by then, though, Amelia was so ill that Morgan had to hold her up at the altar. In Paris, where her condition was finally determined to be tuberculosis, Morgan would carry her up and down seven flights of stairs a day so she could lead what pa.s.sed for a normal life, all to no avail. Four months after the wedding, Alice Sturges by all accounts a lively, intelligent woman died. In some ways, says Morgan's biographer Jean Strouse, he would never get over the loss. Morgan was married again three years later, just after Lincoln's a.s.sa.s.sination, to Frances Louisa Tracy, but it was a union that never seemed to work. He liked crowds, the city, hard work, and the perks that go with life on the center stage. As his own wealth mounted, he became a serious patron of the arts. She wanted a quiet suburban life; art didn't interest her.

They were to remain married until her death, but by 1880 or so, Morgan was regularly putting an ocean between himself and f.a.n.n.y, as Frances was known. He would spend the spring and summer in Europe, often with a mistress; when he returned, f.a.n.n.y would depart for Europe with one of their daughters, a chauffeur, and a paid companion. More mistresses would follow, in New York and elsewhere, along with the occasional show girl more than occasional, if the gossip is to be believed. Morgan spent $1 million to build the Lying Inn maternity hospital in New York City and gave $100,000 a year to it for the rest of his life. The logical explanation for this generosity is that the obstetrician who oversaw the facility was J.P. Morgan's best friend, but the wags and tattlers contended the hospital's princ.i.p.al job was to see to the pregnancies of Morgan's conquests.

Power, as has always been said, is a powerful aphrodisiac, and Morgan had power to burn, both in his vaults and in his person. The great photographer Edward Steichen said that looking into Morgan's eyes was like staring into the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. If you couldn't step off the tracks, Steichen said, it was terrifying. A woman who had known him toldJean Strouse that when Morgan "walked into a room, you felt something electric. He was like the king. He was 'it."'

Morgan had a reputation, too, as an imperious man, and he had the trappings to prove it. There was the art collection worth in the tens of millions of dollars; the town house at Madison Avenue and 36th Street in Manhattan that he had bought in 1880; the library next door that he had Charles McKim design in the early 1900s to house his great book collection; Cragston, the country house up the Hudson River; and perhaps most splendid of all the yachts that carried him between town and country, and from continent to continent. They were all called Corsair, and each was bigger than the last. He bought the first Corsair, a 183-foot beauty, in 1882. When Jay Gould and James Gordon Bennett showed up with longer yachts, Morgan sold the first Corsair and had a second one built, at 241 feet, and when that was requisitioned for the Spanish-American War, he had a third made, at somewhere over 280 feet --a yacht nearly as long as a football field.

Yet for all the high living and the blue blood and he had plenty of that, too Morgan was in many ways more a meritocrat than an aristocrat. He was constantly searching for competent, interesting, original people, and when he found them, he would provide them the resources to do what they were best at, whatever their background. Capable of playing the bully, he also understood quality and gave its lead.

His librarian Belle Greene, who traveled far and wide over Europe searching out new purchases and who seems to have had his absolute trust, had been born Belle Greener. Her father, Jean Strouse discovered in researching Morgan: American Financier, had been the first black man to graduate from Harvard University. Greene appears to have pa.s.sed her whole life as white, but Strouse suspects that had Morgan learned of her racial background, he wouldn't have minded: Once he found talent, he stuck by it. It's no accident either that when Thomas Edison first began furnis.h.i.+ng electricity to customers from his Pearl Street generating station in lower Manhattan, the very first place to be electrified at exactly 3 P.m. on September 4, 1882 was the Wall Street office of J. Pierpont Morgan. Half James Watt and half Matthew Boulton, Edison had an entrepreneurial flair to go along with his inventive genius, and Morgan knew a good idea when he saw one.

Morgan was the great financier of his time, one of America's most public men. Presidents consulted him. On his frequent European trips, he consorted with lords and ladies. At home, he could barely walk across the street from his office at 23 Wall Street without causing at least a ripple of speculation. He was also painfully shy; thoroughly inarticulate with his business partners; private, almost secretive in his deliberations; and extremely volatile when crossed.

"He was famous for his few words, Yes or No," the novel- istJohn Dos Pa.s.sos wrote in his portrait of Morgan in NineteenNineteen, "and for his way of suddenly blowing up in a visitor's face and for that special gesture of the arm that meant, What do Iget out of it?"

Jupiter had been sickly as a child, suffering from seizures, sore throats,and headaches. In his teen years, he was plagued by an aggressive acne that probably presaged the rhinophyma that would so disfigure his nose in later years. At fifteen, he was sent off to the Azores by himself to recover from rheumatic fever, and the loneliness seems to have initiated a depression that would recur throughout his life. As an adult, Morgan would make decisions that would move markets and change the face of industry, but the mechanics of the decisions remained a mystery even to his intimates. One of his partners said, "He's an impossible man to have any talk with. The nearest approach he makes is an occasional grunt." A close friend described him as "very intuitive and instinctive. He couldn't sit down and rationally a.n.a.lyze a problem. Or if he could, he couldn't tell you about it." When the going got really tough, Morgan would retreat by himself to his inner office with two packs of cards to play a double-deck solitaire game called Mrs. Milliken, and somehow in the repet.i.tion of laying the cards out and moving them around, answers would suggest themselves to him, often great and epic answers.

He helped save the United States and perhaps the global economy three times the panics of 1873 and 1893 and the Wall Street crisis of 1907 and all three bailouts further enhanced his stature and reputation and made the world more willing to trust its money with J. P. Morgan. "War and panics on the stock exchange, bankruptcies, warloans good growing weather for the House of Morgan," Dos Pa.s.sos wrote, but it was never as simple as that.

He didn't just stumble into banking. His father, Junius Spencer Morgan, was a highly successful merchant, with offices in Hartford, Connecticut where Pierpont was born in 1837 and later in Boston. Junius Morgan, though, had larger ambitions. He wanted to create in America what the Rothschilds and Baring brothers had in Europe: not just powerful bankers, but a dynasty with tentacles reaching through the entire global banking business and into every corner of American industry. It was to that end that Junius Morgan set himself up in London in 1854: He would be the starting end of the conduit that would facilitate the transfer of European wealth to the New World. The Rothschilds had missed the historic moment; they had one agent in America to handle their business there. The Barings had also failed to move aggressively into the American market: The potential high rewards of investing there came so often with unacceptably high risks. Junius Morgan wouldn't miss the moment, and in his son, John Pierpont, he would offer European investors all the a.s.surance they needed that the money they were sending across the ocean would be in safe and responsible hands when it arrived. To make that a.s.surance he had first to train his son in all the right att.i.tudes.

The first lesson was: No speculative investments. And Junius Morgan, who seems to have spared his son no criticism, taught it with a vengeance. "How could you be so reckless and crazy?" he's said to have once screamed at Pierpont when he ventured into five shares of the Pacific Mall and Steams.h.i.+p Company. The lesson was driven home when the son held on to the shares against his father's will and eventually had to sell them for a loss.

The second lesson flowed from the first: A man who was p.r.o.ne to speculation could not be trusted with the capital of others because, finally, trust was built on character and reputation. In the last year of life, testifying before a House of Representatives Committee convened to investigate the inordinate control Morgan exercised over the nation's economic life, Jupiter condensed this lesson for Congress: Credit, he told committee members, is not based primarily upon money or property "The first thing is character [and that] money cannot buy.... A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bones of Christendom."

And from those two lessons, everything else flowed as well: To be trustworthy, you had to be prudent. To be prudent meant exercising control. And to exercise control effectively, you had to concentrate capital. Put all three together, and you have the process that came to be known as Morganization.

The railroads were the first to be Morganized. They were entering the period of their greatest growth as J.P. Morgan turned 30, in 1867, and thus the time of their greatest need for investment capital. The railroads were also the linchpin that would finally solidify the scatter-shot American economy. Without them, there was no national market nor any effective way to connect raw materials, manufacturers, and consumers in a timely or economic fas.h.i.+on. And the railroads also desperately needed what the merchant bank overseen by Junius Morgan and his son was prepared to offer in such abundance: character, reputation, and probity. Credit Mobilier had been only the most spectacular of a series of railroad frauds dating back into the 1830s.

To raise the money to finance the building of the railroads, the Morgan Bank sold bonds, primarily to European investors and mostly through its London offices. To a.s.sure that the holders of those bonds wouldn't be burned, the Morgan Bank in America would carefully monitor the progress of the railroads in whose names the bonds had been issued. If one went bankrupt, Jupiter himself would move in in the exercise of his fiduciary responsibilities fire the incompetent bra.s.s, hire new managers, reorganize the company, restructure its finances, and finally appoint a new board of directors, always including those who understood his will and often including himself as the prime translator of his own desires.

In time, the weak sisters among the railroads those who couldn't attract new capital, often because they couldn't win the trust of J.P. Morgan were driven out of business. As that happened, an industry that had been characterized more than anything else by savage, often self-destructive compet.i.tion began to concentrate itself into fewer and fewer ent.i.ties, many of them reorganized by Morgan himself: the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, for example, and the Northern Pacific. Where side wars threatened to upset the harmony of the whole that he was creating, Morgan personally intervened to restore peace most notably in the running skirmishes between Pennsylvania railroads and coal producers in that coal-rich state. Thus, the influence of the Morgan Bank spread throughout the railroad industry: By the start of the new century, Morgan had some five thousand miles of rail under his financial control. Thus, too, the investors who had trusted in the Morgan Bank were repaid for their faith: Concentrated control meant that capital could be put to work reproducing itself, rather than endlessly fending off compet.i.tion. And thus the power of the bank (and of Morgan) grew nearly exponentially.

What worked for rails worked for the fledgling electric industry, too, and for farm equipment, steel, and communications: Almost a century after J.P. Morgan's death, his imprint is still all over the New York Stock Exchange Big Board. Ten years after Thomas Alva Edison had first illuminated Morgan's Wall Street office, Morgan put together the financing that created General Electric, the only component of the original Dow Jones Industrial Average, first published in 1896, still a part of the average a hundred years later. International Harvester followed, as did AT&T, both Morganbacked creations meant to concentrate control and eliminate cutthroat compet.i.tion. In 1901, Morgan created the syndicate that paid Andrew Carnegie $480 million for his steel company Carnegie himself got $240 million of the deal. Carnegie Steel, in turn, became the centerpiece of perhaps the greatest of Morgan's industrial creations: U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation and an industry giant for decades to come.

While the deals multiplied, the name on the door simplified. He had started his career in 1857 with Duncan, Sherman, and Company in New York City; moved on to George Peabody & Co. and from there to head the firm named for his father: J.S. Morgan. In 1864, J.S. Morgan had folded into Dabney, Morgan, & Co. and later Drexel, Morgan, & Co. In 1895, the firm became simply J.P. Morgan and Co. -a colossus named for a colossus.

As great as J.P. Morgan's role was in shaping the modern industrial economy, his greater legacy may have been in quelling the financial panics that periodically swept the nation. Morgan had been born during the second administration of Andrew Jackson, just as Old Hickory was succeeding in dismantling the Second Bank of the United States. Morgan would die less than eight months before the Federal Reserve System was created created in large part out of public shock at the range of Morgan's power over America's economic life. In between, for almost the exact span of Morgan's life, there was no central bank other than J.P. Morgan.

John Kenneth Galbraith has noted that panics settled upon the American economy about every twenty years throughout the nineteenth century, just about the length of time it took for the public to forget about the last one. The Panic of 1873 had been ignited by the failure of a leading Philadelphia bank, Jay Cooke and Company, but Cooke himself had fallen victim to an overheated economy and deteriorating conditions in Europe, which still exercised a powerful influence over America's financial life. Twenty years later, in 1893, panic was ready to strike again, just as Grover Cleveland was beginning his second term. This time the contributing factors were a lengthy depression, a sharp decline in foreign trade brought on by the enactment of the McKinley tariff, and a high general burden of private debt, but the trigger was a number anyone could follow: the level of gold reserves in the federal treasury. The a.s.sumption was that $100 million was the baseline number: the amount necessary to a.s.sure that government obligations would be redeemed in gold. When the reserves fell below that line for the first time on April 21, 1893, a panic began that would rage on for more than two years, toppling banks and businesses and driving the nation as a whole into a deep depression.

Morgan had played the pivotal role in turning around the 1873 panic, arranging for a bond issue that allowed the federal government to meet its financial obligations. Now, two decades later, Grover Cleveland turned to him as perhaps the only person in America capable of restoring confidence in the public purse. John Dos Pa.s.sos described the moment: In the panic of '93 at no inconsiderable profit to himself Morgan saved the U.S. Treasury. Gold was draining out, the country was ruined, the farmers were howling for a silver standard, Grover Cleveland and his cabinet were walking up and down in the blue room at the White House without being able to come to a decision, in Congress they were making speeches while the gold reserves melted in the Subtreasuries; poor people were starving; c.o.xey's army was marching to Was.h.i.+ngton; for a long time Grover Cleveland couldn't bring himself to call in the representative of the Wall Street moneymasters; Morgan sat in his suite at the Arlington smoking cigars and quietly playing solitaire until at the last the president sent for him; he had a plan all ready for stopping the gold hemorrhage.

After that what Morgan said went.

Morgan's plan was both the height of simplicity and a measure of how thoroughly he and the inst.i.tution he had created stood at the crossroads of the nation's economic life. As America's de facto lender of last resort, the Morgan Bank would lend the U .S. Treasury $62 million in gold in 1895. Added to the $38 million in gold reserves left in the Treasury, the nation would again have a reserve of $100 million. With that, public confidence started to build and the panic ended. The lessons, though, were slow as always to sink in. In a little more than a decade, the nation would be teetering on the brink of ruin yet again.

Morgan was 70 years old in October 1907, lost in the minutiae of his beloved Episcopalian church at a denominational convention near Richmond, Virginia, when a series of telegrams arrived from his office. Under the pressure of tumbling stock prices, several prominent brokerage houses had been forced to close their doors. Danger of the worst sort lay ahead for Wall Street and the stock exchange unless the tide could be reversed. In Congress, conservative lawmakers were lambasting Teddy Roosevelt for the problems: His trust-busting and excessive regulation, they claimed, were leading big business to ruin. At the Morgan Bank, which had helped create many of the businesses under a.s.sault by Roosevelt, a more profound and immediate truth prevailed: If prominent brokerage houses had already gone under in the crisis, lesser ones were sure to follow, in abundance. Once that happened, the deluge would be on. The stock market would collapse, and the national economy with it.

By today's terms, the situation was almost certainly containable. The Federal Reserve Board, the secretary of the treasury, and the president all have macro- and micro-economic tools at their immediate disposal that a turn-of-the-century economist or political leader could barely imagine; and the stock exchanges have brakes of their own to build breathing room into a selling panic. In 1907, though, just as in 1893 to 1895, there seemed to be only one solution, and it was entirely extra-governmental. For what was to be a final time, Jupiter J.P. Morgan would come to the rescue.

Morgan waited until the church convention ended that weekend, then rushed back to New York City by private railroad car, drawn by a night train. Anything more rash, he had been told, was likely to spook an already scared market. He spent Sunday in his library, surrounded by business partners and lieutenants. By Monday, the New York financial district was in turmoil. Thousands thronged the streets, trying to get their money out of the banks. Managers had instructed tellers to count money in slow motion, but the tedious delay only accentuated the crisis. As banks around the nation withdrew their reserves from New York, the panic broadened and the danger spread. Morgan had been back in town less than a week when New York officials came to him with news that the city couldn't meet its own payroll obligations and would have to declare bankruptcy the next Monday. To fend off that likelihood, he came up with $100 million worth of commercial bank loans, but that didn't help Wall Street.

For nearly three weeks Morgan's team had been a.s.sessing financial inst.i.tutions, deciding which should be left to fail and which were strong and well-managed enough to merit help. For the latter group, he and other financiers raised hundreds of millions of dollars in support, including loans from the same U .S. Treasury that Morgan had helped to rescue a dozen years earlier. As the panic wore on, Morgan himself began to wear down. He'd scarcely eaten for three days and was suffering from a terrible cold when the head of the Stock Exchange crossed the street to Morgan's office to tell him that the exchange would have to close. Morgan shook his head in response: Shutting down the stock exchange, he said, would lead to a widespread depression. Instead, he gathered the leading bankers in New York together in his library the men who controlled the money that Wall Street lived off of and presented them with a stark proposition: "We need $20 million in the next ten minutes," Morgan said, "or the stock exchange will have to close early." For added emphasis, Morgan is said to have locked the library doors, vowing no man would leave until all the money was pledged. From someone else it might have been a bluff, but as had been the case with J.P. Morgan for more than forty years, his reputation preceded him, and his character as well. The bank presidents capitulated, and the Panic of 1907 turned the corner and began to end.

As news of the rescue circulated through the Stock Exchange, Morgan could hear a roar across the street. The mighty and feared Jupiter was being given an ovation by the jubilant floor traders.

ForJ.P Morgan & Company there would be other chances to ride to the aid of the nation, if not to save it. Morgan's son, J.P. Jr., would oversee a syndicate that raised another $100 million to preserve New York City's credit in 1913. During World War I the Allies borrowed nearly $1.9 billion through the company; afterwards Morgan & Company floated loans of nearly $1.7 billion for European recon struction. For Jupiter himself, though, the Panic of 1907 was the last hurrah.

"For about a minute he was regarded as a national hero," his biographer jean Strouse told an interviewer. "Crowds cheered when he walked down Wall Street, and world political leaders and bankers sent telegrams expressing their awe that one man had been able to do that. But the next minute a democratic nation was really quite horrified at the idea that one man had this much power."

Rather than trust its fate again to a single citizen, the United States established the Federal Reserve system in 1913, returning to a form of the central bank it had abandoned almost eighty years earlier. From now on, the nation would be its own lender of last resort, and the governors of the system would be appointed by the President and answerable to Congress. A century that had begun with John Pierpont Morgan as the absolute czar of American finance would end with Alan Greenspan filling that role the difference great not only in degree but in kind. Even if he had a desire to, the enigmatic Greenspan could never move markets the way Morgan could by a simple grunt or lifting of his arm.

Congress caught the spirit of a people who had decided Jupiter's time had pa.s.sed. What had seemed a grand benevolence suddenly had become a stranglehold on credit and capital, and Americans have never trusted concentrated wealth. In 1911, Louisiana Representative Arsane Pujo opened congressional hearings on money trusts and their affect on the common weal. In December 1912, already past his 75th birthday, J.P. Morgan appeared before the panel. Not surprisingly, he didn't yield an inch. Less than four months later, he was dead.

In its editorial extolling the fallen financier, the New York Times of April 1, 1913, caught the spirit of both the man and the history he had lived through and helped create.

We may look upon Mr. Morgan's like again there were great men before and after Agamennon, but we shall not look upon another career like his. The time for that has gone by. Conditions have changed, and Mr. Morgan, the mighty and dominant figure of finance, did more than any other man to change them. Forty years ago, when he was coming to prominence here and abroad, Wall Street was in the stage of youth and promise. There was no money power then; by far the greater part of the Nation's present wealth has been created since that day.

Mr. Morgan was born for leaders.h.i.+p, for constructive work. With his unmatched abilities, with his character and the confidence he inspired, and with his power to organize and command, it was inevitable that he should be the leader, the builder-up in the domain on American finance. The growth in his time was prodigious, and now Wall Street is beyond the need or the possibility of one-man leaders.h.i.+p. There will be co-ordination of effort, the union of resources, but Mr. Morgan will have no successor; there will be no one man to whom all will look for direction.

The Times estimated J.P. Morgan's fortune at "near $100,000,000," including art and other collectibles with a worth of anywhere from $30 million to $60 million. Later estimates downplayed the figure to about $80 million. Either way, it was a tremendous fortune perhaps equaling $1.5 billion to $3 billion in current dollars. One man, though, wasn't impressed. Having read the Times account of Morgan's a.s.sets, he is said to have shook his head and commented, "And to think, he wasn't even a rich man." The story is almost certainly apocryphal it's too good to be true but the man the quote is attributed to is anything but made up: John Davison Rockefeller.

8.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER.

Organizing the Octopus.

*N 1861, AT THE START OF THE CIVIL WAR, NO American company had achieved a market capitalization as high as $10 million. By the start of the twentieth century, 300 companies had. The largest of them, U .S. Steel, had a market cap of $1.4 billion, this at a time when the annual gross national product barely topped $20 billion. Under the stern tutelage of J.P. Morgan, American business was consolidating. A nation of shop owners, craftsmen, and small manufacturers was becoming a nation of shop clerks, factory workers, and sprawling corporations. In metals, transportation, utilities, and other sectors, the cutthroat compet.i.tion that traditionally characterizes industries in their formative years much like the technology industry today was giving way to cutthroat trusts.

The great trusts of the late 1800s were necessary legal creations. Under the laws of the day, corporations could not own stock in businesses located outside their state of incorporation. To allow a company to operate nationally, individual shareholders in aligned corporations would surrender their stock to a group of trustees and receive trust certificates in return. By the turn of the century, though, almost no one thought of trusts in their fine legal sense. "Trusts" had come to be synonymous with "monopolies": They combined separate but, in fact, inseparable ent.i.ties under a single leaders.h.i.+p not to facilitate interstate business or achieve economies of scale but to eliminate and, if necessary, ruthlessly stamp out compet.i.tion.

This consolidation of control inevitably meant a consolidation of wealth. The more broadly a corporation spread itself over all aspects of its business, the more it could control prices paid to suppliers, prices charged to customers, and labor and production costs. Inevitably, too, the consolidated wealth flowed most freely and generously to the top of the trusts, where the greatest control was exercised. America had produced plenty of fortunes in her first hundred years the land was too plentiful to do otherwise but with the creation of trusts, the nation launched a new breed of the super-rich. Collectively, they came to be known by a useful phrase first introduced into the language in 1872: robber barons.

The history of the twentieth century tends to be written in terms of political leaders: Wilson, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Mao Zedong they bestrode their times like colossi. The nineteenth century was different, especially the closing decades. After the a.s.sa.s.sination of Lincoln and the presidential follies of his successors Andrew Johnson and the war hero Ulysses Grant, politicians disappear from American history. Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, the two separate Grover Cleveland administrations, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley who even remembers them anymore, except as footnotes in the long, sad history of presidential a.s.sa.s.sinations? In an era of Big Business, not Big Politics, it was businessmen who drove their times, and the robber barons more so than any of them. Astor, Carnegie, Cooke, Gould, Harrison, Hill, Huntington, Morgan, Stanford, Vanderbilt those are the names that define the history of the latter part of the nineteenth cen tury. To them, politicians were at best a necessary evil, people to be paid off to be kept out of the way.

Two factors, though, were working to change that equation as the twentieth century dawned. One was a crusading journalist named Ida Tarbell, who starting in 1902 began to publish a series of highly popular articles in McClure's Magazine under the deceptively bland t.i.tle 'A History of Standard Oil." The articles, which continued for nearly three years, laid out in astoundingly accurate, poignant, and sometimes almost lurid detail the inner workings of one of the most powerful and ruthlessly a.s.sembled of all the trusts. At the same time, Teddy Roosevelt, nearing the end of his first elected term as president, was looking for an unrepentant trust to bust. Tarbell handed him Standard Oil for the purpose. The government had been pursuing the oil giant in the courts ever since the Sherman Ant.i.trust Act was pa.s.sed in 1890; under Roosevelt, though, the court case would become part and parcel of his political ambition, the makings of a crusade. For good measure Tarbell threw into the mix the man her articles had helped turn into the most reviled man in America, and one of the most loathed people in the world: Standard Oil's own robber baron, John Davison Rockefeller. For Rockefeller, who refused to dignify the McClure's series with a reb.u.t.tal, Teddy Roosevelt's efforts to ratchet up ant.i.trust action must have added insult to injury: He had contributed $250,000 equivalent to more than $1 million today to the McKinley-Roosevelt campaign in 1896, precisely so this wouldn't occur.

Like Morgan, Rockefeller was a man of relentless contradictions, almost all of them carried to an absolute extreme. The philosopher William James, brother of Henry and one of the great intellects of his age, said that John D. Rockefeller was the most strongly bad and strongly good human being he had ever met, and also one of the most suggestive and formidable personalities: 'A man 10 stories deep," he wrote to Henry, "and to me quite unfathomable ... superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced."

From his mother, Eliza, Rockefeller had inherited a fierce piety; a moral strictness that stressed thrift, industriousness, and discipline; and a powerful social conscience. Morgan and Rockefeller were both of fighting age when the Civil War broke out, and each would buy his way out of service in the Civil War for $300 in the North, the practice was common among those who had the wherewithal. But unlike Morgan and his father, for whom the war was largely seen as a business inconvenience, Rockefeller was neither unconcerned with nor immune to the most volatile issues of the time. Not only was he an abolitionist himself, he married into a family of ardent abolitionists people who had been conductors on the Underground Railroad and who had sheltered Sojourner Truth in their house.

Indeed, in Laura "Cetti" Spelman, his wife of 50 years, Rockefeller seems to have found his mother incarnate. Like Eliza, she was a teetotaler and a model of piety, habits that great wealth seemed to ingrain still more deeply. Eventually, the Rockefellers would have four estates to choose from, some with beautiful bridle paths and all with a nine-hole golf course so John D. could indulge in his favorite pastime. Inside, though, there was almost nothing frivolous. J.P. Morgan adorned his mansions with great art, jeweled snuff boxes, and actresses whom he liked to have call him "Commodore." The Rockefellers seem to have furnished theirs with the kind of dourness that is so often a handmaiden to an overpowering religiosity. Nothing went to waste, not even affection. John D. Jr., their only son, once