Collection of the Museum of American Finance
Library of Congress
Morgan and Schiff
America ’ s Indispensable Bankers
J . P . Morgan Jacob Schiff
By Edward Morris
On March 31 , 1913 , at age 73 , American financier J . Pierpont Morgan died at the Grand Hotel in Rome . The next day , his death was the dominant newspaper story throughout the country . The New York Times dedicated much of its April 1 front page and several succeeding columns to reviewing his life and accomplishments . His funeral service was held at St . George ’ s Episcopal Church , where limited seating accommodated only 1,500 people . Those people were important enough in Morgan ’ s life to receive an admission ticket and an assigned seat . Thousands of others waited outside or in the nearby Stuyvesant Park to pay tribute .
Seven years later , Jacob Schiff died , also at 73 , and had been the only banker who approached Morgan ’ s prominence in the financial world . That prominence was reinforced by the major front-page stories that immediately appeared in the press . As with Morgan , the Times coverage of his funeral was the lead story and consumed much of the paper ’ s front page . His funeral was held at the Emanu-El synagogue and was , like Morgan ’ s service , limited to the mourners to whom tickets were issued . Many of those without tickets were Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and performed their own services outside the synagogue .
Included in the newspaper accounts of Morgan and Schiff ’ s lives were estimates
of their wealth at the time they died . Those estimates were rough and mostly obtained from individuals who were outsiders with limited access to Morgan and Schiff ’ s firms and families , so there is no reason to expect accuracy . But the papers ’ readers were nevertheless interested to learn that each banker ’ s wealth was likely between $ 50 and $ 100 million . In today ’ s dollars , that would be between $ 1.5 and $ 3 billion . Those are clearly high levels of wealth , but thought to be significantly less than that of some of the well-known plutocrats of the day : Henry Ford , Andrew Carnegie , Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Rockefeller . At Morgan ’ s funeral , Rockefeller was purported to have remarked that , “ He owned all of us and he wasn ’ t even that rich .”
Today most people have at least a vague idea of who Morgan was . Several biographies have been written about his life and his name is still part of two large financial institutions : JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley . It is unlikely , however , that many recall the name Jacob H . Schiff or Kuhn , Loeb & Company , the once mighty investment banking firm he ran .
Early Backgrounds of J . P . Morgan and Jacob Schiff
There is no credible rags-to-riches story about the lives of either of the two men . Morgan was the sole surviving male child of Junius Morgan , a merchant banker who operated out of Hartford and Boston , and formed a very successful partnership in London with the international banker George Peabody . Junius carefully monitored and nurtured young Pierpont along — including providing the means for his education stints at the Boston English School in the mid-1850s , followed by a few years of studies at a Swiss school near Lake Geneva and then at a German school near Hanover . With the world of business becoming ever more international , Junius rightly saw that education abroad would sharpen Pierpont ’ s facility with foreign languages and enhance his son ’ s effectiveness in dealing with monied interests on the European continent . In addition to his studies , the teenage Pierpont took excursions to many western European countries and developed a life-long appetite for ancient art — an appetite that would expand throughout his lifetime .
Junius later shaped his son ’ s Wall Street career by finding job opportunities for him from among the investment firms he routinely did business with . The most important arrangement Junius engineered for Pierpont was an alliance with Philadelphia-based Drexel & Company , a firm that had considerable success in finding investment opportunities for European investors . That partnership , fueled with a $ 5 million infusion from Junius , led to a New York off-shoot , first called Drexel Morgan & Company and later just Morgan & Company which , after a few years , was managed by young Pierpont .
28 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Spring 2021 | www . MoAF . org