When JP Morgan canceled his plans to sail on the Titanic’s maiden voyage in April 1912, he believed he had cheated a gruesome death. The news of the sinking seemed to confirm it: the richest man aboard, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the ship, while Morgan’s money had bought him another chance at life. But the escape was only temporary. A year later, the illness that had stalked him since youth returned with a vengeance, and the man who had controlled banks, corporations, and even the U.
S. Treasury found himself helpless before his own failing body. Morgan had been born into advantage in 1837 in Connecticut. His father inherited a fortune and became a partner in a banking firm, and his mother’s lineage included poets, among them the composer of “Jingle Bells.
” But even the Morgan name could not protect the boy from illness. At fifteen, he contracted a painful rheumatic fever, and although his father sent him to Portugal to recover, it took a full year before he regained his strength. The flare-ups of pain never truly left him. Perhaps the brush with death sharpened his ambition.
His father sent him to study in Switzerland and Germany, then secured him a first job on Wall Street. For fourteen years, Morgan worked in his father’s business, building a reputation. Eventually, he grew tired of living in that shadow. While working for Duncan Sherman and Company, he operated in the South to learn the cotton trade, but when he saw a chance to profit from a coffee trade without authorization, he took it.
The bank chastised him. Morgan, who was about twenty-two at the time, hardly seemed to care. He was already planning with his father to go into business for himself. His plans, however, did not anticipate love.
In the summer of 1859, Morgan met Amelia Sturgis and fell deeply in love. After two years of courtship, they wanted to marry. But by then, Sturgis had contracted tuberculosis, and by the wedding day, most would have accepted that she was too far gone. Morgan refused.
The couple married in October 1861, but Sturgis was so weak she could not even make it to the ceremony. Morgan carried her to the drawing room for the private wedding, then carried her again to the carriage that took them to the pier for their honeymoon. They had promised to love each other until death did them part, and Morgan insisted that parting would not come soon. He hoped the warm climate would restore them both.
He remained married to Sturgis for a little over four months. She died in Nice in February 1862. The loss shattered whatever romantic hopes he had kept. With nothing else, he poured his grief into business.
Around that time, he opened his first private company, J. P. Morgan and Company. But America had erupted into the Civil War, and the Union needed men.
Morgan believed he was better used elsewhere. When the draft called his name, he paid another man three hundred dollars to take his place in the Union Army. That solved his personal problem, but his business faced its own difficulties. Before the war, Morgan had worked in cotton and iron imports for the railroads; both markets collapsed as battles began.
He adapted by using his connections in England to keep profiting while many Americans suffered. Shortly after losing Amelia, he and his partner manipulated gold markets and made a large profit off their holdings. As average Americans went down, Morgan rose. The move drew critics, but by then it was the least of his worries.
His reputation had already begun to tarnish when he loaned twenty thousand dollars to a New York attorney named Simon Stevens. Stevens used the money to buy five thousand carbine rifles, which he then sold to a government general for twice the price. Morgan profited from the exchange, and the House of Representatives condemned such profiteers as worse than traders in arms. When public interest revived in 1910, new information made matters look worse: the general had overpaid, and the rifles were defective, likely to explode out of the back instead of firing properly.
Despite the scandals, Morgan’s bank was viewed by the end of the Civil War as strong and reliable. In 1865, he negotiated a contract to be the exclusive importer of guano from Peru, used in fertilizer and gunpowder. That same year, he remarried, this time to Frances Louisa Tracy, with whom he would have four children. But the outward success hid a darker personal truth.
By 1890, he was thoroughly tired of the marriage and spent nearly all his time with other women. He practiced what appeared to be serial monogamy, moving from one companion to the next, and his wealth and charisma made finding a new partner easy. His personality was forceful. One visitor said a call from Morgan left him feeling as if a gale had blown through the house.
But that force could not overcome the affliction that ravaged his face. By his forties, Morgan suffered from a condition that deformed the skin of his nose, twisting it with pits, nodules, and fissures, leaving it large, bulbous, and purplish. Unable to bear the stigma, he hid himself away, refused photographs unless they were professionally retouched, and could lash out if surprised by a photographer. The public taunted him with rhymes about his purple nose.
What made it worse was that he did not have to live that way. Medical practices had advanced enough that the growths could have been removed. Morgan refused surgery. His son-in-law suspected the fear went back to childhood, when Morgan had suffered infantile seizures in addition to rheumatic fever; he may have feared that surgery on his nose would bring the seizures back.
In any case, he would not take the risk. By the turn of the century, everyone depended on Morgan, including the U. S. government.
In 1895 and again in 1907, the country sat on the brink of financial crisis. When the Treasury’s gold reserves shrank to almost nothing, Morgan provided what was needed, saving the Treasury though sinking President Grover Cleveland’s career in the process. The 1907 crisis was more complicated. Major banks faced bankruptcy with no government safety net.
Morgan overpowered the situation, playing a major role in reallocating funds between banks and trusts, and conveniently removing competition along the way. When a firm named Moore and Schley could not repay its loans, Morgan proposed a solution: his own company, U. S. Steel, would absorb it.
With special permission from President Roosevelt, U. S. Steel swallowed its competition, turning into a virtual monopoly. The crisis ended, and Morgan ended up better off than before.
By the 1910s, J. P. Morgan and Company had grown into a financial empire. It invested widely, including in the International Mercantile Marine Company, an Atlantic shipping firm that controlled many smaller lines, among them the White Star Line.
The White Star Line had banked everything on its newest luxury liner, the RMS Titanic, advertised as the biggest and most unsinkable ship ever made. Morgan intended to sail on her maiden voyage and bought one of the luxury suites with a private promenade deck. At the last minute, he changed his plans. The Titanic sailed without him.
When the news of the sinking arrived, Morgan knew he had escaped death. The Titanic took the White Star Line and the International Mercantile Marine Company down with it, but Morgan showed social grace in the tragedy, announcing that monetary losses amounted to nothing in life; it was the loss of life that counted. Even so, he had not escaped his past. The rheumatic fever he had suffered as a teenager never fully left him, and near the end of his life it robbed him of the ability to walk.
Just a year after the Titanic sank, Morgan went into a rapid decline. It began with extreme weakness. Then his body began to rebel. When he tried to speak, his throat contracted and would not let him.
Soon he could not eat either; the muscles in his throat had ceased to work entirely. The only relief was sleep. For all his wealth, a quick death was one of the only things he could not buy. He spent the last weeks of his life in a long, painful decline, slipping in and out of consciousness, sustained by injections because he could no longer consume food.
JP Morgan died on March 31, 1913, in Rome, Italy, while traveling abroad. The man who had been larger than life returned home in a box. The empire he built waited to honor him: the stock market closed for two hours in observance of his death, a custom usually reserved for heads of state. Morgan had revolutionized the banking system and saved Wall Street several times over.
His critics accused him of helping create a culture where the few control the bulk of the wealth. Both things can be true. And both are part of the legacy of the man who escaped the Titanic, only to be overtaken by the illness he had carried with him for a lifetime.