Now encore booknotes for our third jean strouse was a guest on booknotes to talk about her book morgan american financier in 1999. This biography of j. Pierpont market for trade him as a man who revolutionized banking and the American Economic structure while damaging many of his personal and professional relationships. This is about an hour. Cspan jean strouse, author of morgan american financier, there are a couple pictures inside your book. Can you tell us the story behind these two . Guest those pictures were taken by the photographer, edward steichen, in 1903. He was just starting out as a photographer and morgan was sitting for a portraithaving his portrait painted. And he hated to sit still for very long, so alfred stieglitz, who was a very famous photographer, decided that morgan should have a photothe painter should have a photograph to work from, and hired edward steichen, who was just starting out in his career, to do it. Steichen came inhe actually posed a janitor in the shot while he set it up to get it ready for morgan. Morgan blew in, sat down very quickly, took the pose that he always took for the portrait painter, and steichen made the quick exposure and took that shot. However, he didnt really like the pose. He thought it was too formal, too selfconscious, and he asked morgan to rearrange himself a little bit, to move his head slightly to one side and get in a more comfortable position. Morgan was not pleased to be told to rearrange himself a little bit, so he bristled a bit. And steichen immediately saw that this was the morganhe saw these sort of piercing eyes and this imposing presence, and immediately took that shot. Thats the second shot. Its on your right. And morgan has his hand on the handle of his chair. Cspan this shot over here or. Guest no, on. Cspan this shot over here. Guest yeah, that shot. Hes got his hand on the handle of the chairits a metal chairand when the photograph came out, it makes it look like hes holding a dagger, that hes sort of about to advance out of the frame like a capitalist pirate of popular mythology. So steichen had these two photographs, one the official one, and one, this second one, which was sort of morgan in fierce mode. He showed morgan both of them. Morgan hated the second one because it makes him look so fierce, and tore it up and ordered many copies of the first one, which was the blander, more conventional picture. And steichen was so angry at him for tearing up the picture that years later, when morgans librarian asked forthought that the second picture was much more dynamic and assertive and alive, she asked for copies of it and steichen kept them waiting for years because he was so angry at morgan for having torn up the first one. Its the most famous image of morgan, the one with the hand on the dagger. Cspan but the thing i want to ask you about in these photographs isfirst of all, how old was he here . Guest he was in his middle 60s. Cspan and you write many, many times about the nose. Now you look at this picture, you dont see anything that unusual about the nose. Guest it was slightly touched up. Morgan had an inherited skin condition called rhinophyma, which is excess growth of sebaceous tissue. And in his 50s, it turned his nose into a hideous purple bulb it wasit looks like an alcoholic nose, although that was not the cause of it. W. C. Fields had something rather similar. And now it could be easily corrected by laser surgery. It could actually have been corrected during morgans lifetime by surgery, but for various reasons, he chose not to do that. I can go into that if youd like, but it was a very big fact in his life. He was so public and he was constantly meeting new people, and he would kind of glare at you when he met you, because you couldnt look at him without looking at his nose. And his handshake and his imposing glare was kind of daring people to flinch or to react, or in some way lookyou know, not deal with his nose. Steichen, when he took that picture, afterwards wrote that looking into j. P. Morgans eyes is like staring into the lights of an oncoming express train. And, i mean, imagine being this very public figure, very much being criticized on all sides for some of what he was doing and having this deformity that everybody had to deal with when they met him. So itsi think part of that is in the picture, that sort of glaring defiance. But i actually tried to find the negatives of those pictures from steichen to see if he had touched them up or whether he touched it up in the print, and i wasnt able to find the originals. Cspan now you have a photograph on the front cover. How old was he in this one . Guest abouthe was a few years older. We dont know. I would guess that photograph is around 1910 and the other one is 1903, but thats just a guess from how he looked. I dont know for sure when that picture was taken. Cspan when did you first get to know him . Guest well, i first started on this project in 1983. I would say that it was several y. Cspan 16 years or. Guest well, 16 since its out. I finished it last august, so it wastook me 15 years to write this book. So i first met him in 1983. I would say i didnt really get to know him for about 10 years after that. It took a very long time to find my way into this character. He was very alien to me. He was not articulate. He was not introspective. He didnt want to know any of the things i wanted to know about him. And so that was, in a way, the most centrally difficult aspect of writing this life. Other difficult aspects were learning about finance, since i was an english major, and i really didnt start out with any familiarity with this. But morgans character, which has to be at the center of any biography thats going to come to life, was just extremely difficult for me to get to know. Cspan where were you living when you started to get to know him, and how did you get to know him . Guest i was living in new york, and i stayed there the whole time. His life is very much involved, engaged in the history of new york. He lived both in new york and in london, and i went to england many times to do research. But i stayed basically in new york the whole time. I got to know him primarily through archival material. He died in 1913, so there were a couple of people still alive that i could talk to, and ill come back to that in a minute. But mostly, it was through letters and diaries. And the Morgan Library in new york turned out to have a basement full of uncataloged papers, which was really what got me going on this project, cause it was just a biographers dream, all this material that had not really been looked at before. So i was reading his grandfathers diaries for 30 years, his sons letters home, he had two wives, one died young and then a second wife. I found their diaries. I found all of his childhood schoolbooks, his letters home from whenever he went across the atlantic, which was a lot, journals he kept when he was traveling in egypt. So there was just an amazing amount of material, plus all the dealers of the records of the art dealers that he was a major art collector, and i found at the Morgan Library records of all of that, and bankbooks, syndicate books, registers of what his firm was doing. Cspan what were you doing in 1983 . Guest i had been working as a book critic at Newsweek Magazine for about four years, and so i was writing about books that were coming out at the moment. My previous book was a biography of alice james. I did that in the late 70s. It came out in 1980. And the contrast between the james family and the Morgan Family was really quite striking. The jamess were intellectuals, they were extremely articulate. They lived in language, in a way, which, for a writer, was extremely helpful. And i didnt realize how much id been able to kind of stand on their shoulders until i was dealing with morgan and his family, because they werent writers, they werent questioning themselves in the same way that the jamess were. So its the same period, late 19th century, but a different universe. And trying to get morgan to talk to me was really, really the hardest thing about this biography. And clearly, i realized about five years into it, he wasnt gonnai couldnt get him to speak my language, i had to learn his language, and it was the language of what he did. He washenry adams said of Theodore Roosevelt that he was pure act, and you could have said that about morgan as well. He was instinctive, he was intuitive, i think he was actually quite a brilliant man, but its not the kind of brilliance that people trained in the humanities know about. And i had to really learn to see how his intelligence operated. I did find a lot of his letters and they were better thani mean, im exaggerating slightly to say that he was inarticulate when he was interested in something, he absolutely could express it, and i found there were wonderful glimpses, but not enough, not as many as for the jamess. Cspan i want to ask you about the women in his life. Who is this . Guest that was his first wife. Her name was amelia sturges. She was the daughter of a prominent new york merchant and patron of the arts named jonathan sturges. He fell in love with her shortly after he moved to new york, when he was 20 years old, in 1857, and courted her for a couple of years. They got engaged in 59 andim sorry, in 1960 they got engagedand the winterthey were going to be married in october of 61that winter before their wedding, she came down with a series of colds and a bad cough that would not go away. By the summer, she was so sick that she said, i dont think i can marry you. We should postpone the wedding. he said, nonsense, well take you to the sun in the mediterranean and fix you right up. and they got married in october of 1861 in her parents parlor in new york. She was so frail, he had to hold her up at the altar, and she kept the veil over her face during the ceremony, cause she felt she was so thin, she wasnt pretty anymore. He took her to paris, where lung specialists diagnosed her with tuberculosis, which came as a shock to him. He hadnt realized thats what it was. Then they went to algiers and then to nice. He rented a villa in nice, and he was the mostit was really quite surprising. I found her diaries and letters, which tell this story in a very dramatic way. He carried her up and down seven flights of stairs a day in paris. He brought her her favorite foods, bought birds to keep her company. Eventually, he bought herhe asked her mother to come stay with them, because she was just getting sicker and sicker, and he felt he couldnt nurse her himself. The mother came overand this was in nice in january and february of 1862and she died four months after her wedding. And he was heartbroken, obviously, and i think in some ways, never really got over that loss. She was very lively, intelligent, curious, wonderful girl. I kinda got to know her as he got to know her, through her letters and diaries. And she died at the age of 25. You know, she was all youthful promise. It washe never had to find out what that marriage would have been like. It was kind of preserved in amber for him at that youthful stage. Cspan how old was he in 1861 . Guest he wasshe was a year older, so he was 22 and she was 23 when they got married, and then four months laterim sorry, he was 24 and she was 25. Cspan how was he able, at age 24, in 1861, to leave the United States and not fight in the civil war . Guest well, he camehe was from a wealthy family, and his father, by this time, was working as a merchant banker in london. He actuallymorganboth sides of his family came to america before the revolution, so they were really members of the american patriciate. You could buyyou pay for a substitute to fight in the civil war. Youd pay 300 and somebody else would go in your place, which is what morgan did. Many other men did that as well it sounds to us like shirking, and certainly, many men who didnt fight felt guilty about it for the rest of their lives. It was, at the time, quite an acceptable thing to do in certain classes and for certain people, and surprising people didnt fight. In the james family, for instance, which i know a lot about, the younger two boys did go off to war, william and henry did not. Morgan didnt. Some of the adamss did and some of them didnt. It was interesting to see whichhow it lines up. He and his father hated the idea of the civil war, because it was gonna disrupt business. They were doing cotton trading with england, they were trying to build america with European Capital, build americas future and thewar interrupts commerce. It interrupts all sorts of other things. They werent terribly interested in the issue of slavery and the moral cause of the civil war, they were more interested in keeping business going. Cspan another woman in his life is this one right here. Who is that . Guest thats his second wife, frances louisa tracy, whom he married about three years later, 1865, just at the end of the civil war, right after lincoln was shot and the war was concluded. That was an ok marriage for maybe 10 or 15 years. They had four children, who were also in the picture you just held up, but very quickly, it became clear that they had very different tastes and very different instinct. He loved new york, he loved throngs of people, he was a workaholic, he liked activity and traveladventurous travel. She was much more domestic and quiet. She liked being home with the children, she wanted to leave new york for suburban new jersey; she wasnt very interested in art, he was passionate about art. So after about 15 years, he kind of kept the atlantic between them. He would go off to europe in the spring and summer with a party of friends and travel around, oftensometimes he would take one of his daughters, and then later, he would take a mistress and when he came back from europe, he would send his wife abroad in the fall and winter with one of their daughters and a chauffeur and a paid companion. So pretty much, they lived separate lives after about 1880. Cspan did they ever divorce . Guest no. Divorce was really not an option in that world. Some people did, but it was very scandalous and shocking. And interestingly enough, it was alwaysthe women wereit was more disruptive for the woman. Women were objects of scandal, even if they had done nothing wrong. And a couple of the people the morgans knew who dwomen who did get divorced, moved to europe, just because it was a much more accepting, forgiving society. And also, i think, in professional terms, morgan was a conservative banker with a reputation for integrity. Divorce didnt figure into that picture. Cspan this picture right here is of which woman in his life . Guest that is a woman named edith sybil randolph, who was his first mistress or the first one that i was able to find anything out about. She was a widow, very beautiful, as you can see from the picture, younger than he. He was probablyit was 1890, so he was in his 50s, he was about 53 and she was probably in her late 30s. Her husband had died a few years before. She had two children. And morgan was with her for about five years, again, traveling to europe with her, seeing her in new york, taking her on his yacht cruises. And his wife didntin the wifes diaries, there are rather sad entrances about mrs. Randolph being around in a lot of morgans parties. There were so many people around that i think it was possible for him to sort of muffle the truth about what was going on. And he was with her for about five years, and then i think the wifehis wife found out. In one of her diaries, it says, one day, spoke to p. About mrs. R. , and thats the last mention of mrs. R. In mrs. Morgans diaries. So i think that was a fairly dramatic moment. He then had to kind of keep it more secret, and he was notits interesting, he washe lived veryhe was much more of a european than an american puritan about all this the european aristocrats had mistresses. They would travel to other friends Country Houses, they would stay in european hotels. They trusted their friends not to talk. It was sort of accepted, especially in the prince of wales set. He had these women with him, he traveled, and everybody knew about it, and nobody really talked about it. And i think morgan sort of did more or less the same thing. But once his wife found out, it was a problem. And the other problem was that this mrs. Randolph was relatively young and not wealthy and she needed a husband, and morgan was not going to get divorced. So a rather convenient solution came along. Another prominent american man of their world was william c. Whitney, who had been secretary of the navy under grover cleveland. He had also been quite taken with mrs. Randolph while he was married, and his wife made a big fuss about it, so that was the end of that. And then his wife died in the late 1880searly 90s, actually. And so whitney married Edith Randolph and morgan took up with her best friend, who was a woman named adelaide louisa townsend, who was quite a wonderful person, not as beautiful as edith whitneyEdith Randolph whitney, but very energetic and full of life and a real match for him in her appreciation of art and travel, and she was sort of a wonderful spirit. I met someone who had actually known her, an older woman who knew her. And also i meti eventually met her grandson, which was a lot of fun cause he could tell me quite a lot about her life and the house that she lived in on park avenue. And he said that there was a special back entrance for mr. Morgan and that the children were told to disappear when mr. Morgan arrived. I mean, therebecauseas i say, because morgan died so long ago, it was hard to find people who actually had memories of any of this, and that was thrilling. Cspan heres a picture of a dining event, and you can see mr. Morgan there on the right, and whos the lady on the left . Guest actually, morgans in the center, toward the rear of the picture, in the back. Cspan oh, in the back . Guest in the back. Cspan oh, ok. Guest the centerits hard to tell. I think weve described it not very well, because we say in the center and its hard to tell which is the center. Cspan yeah, i thought it was. Guest hes not the man in the front. Cspan i thought he had the white moustache there. Guest yes, right. Thatsiwe have to fix that. Cspan so hes all the way back there. Guest right there, exactly. Cspan yeah. And whos this woman on the other side of him . Guest thatyes, on the left of him is adelaide douglas. Its a small picture, so you wont really be able to see what she looks like. Shes under youryeah, shes in that other picture on the righthand side of the book, and you can see that shes not a great beauty, but she had tremendous presence and elegance. And they would go to europe and see edward vii and Kaiser Wilhelm and they really traveled in fairly distinguished company, and she was very much up to that world. His wife really didnt enjoy that world very much. Cspan whered he meet her . Guest adelaide . I dont know. Very possibly they were in similar social circles. Her husband was a yachtsman, as morgan was. I would suspect he met her through Edi