Photograph: J. P. Morgan as Cutthroat Capitalist

[pacalo]

I read this article in The Smithsonian magazine yesterday while in a doctor's waiting room. I thought everyone would appreciate the irony of the article as I did.

In 1903, photographer Edward Steichen portrayed the American tycoon in an especially ruthless light

(...)

Morgan also commissioned a number of portraits of himself—but he was too restless and busy making money to sit still while they were painted.

Which was why, in 1903, the painter Fedor Encke hired a young photographer named Edward Steichen to take Morgan’s picture as a kind of cheat sheet for a portrait Encke was trying to finish.

The sitting lasted just three minutes, during which Steichen took only two photographs. But one of them would define Morgan forever.

(...)

But the second image became a sensation. Morgan’s expression is forbidding: his mustache forms a frown, and his eyes (which Steichen later compared to the headlights of an express train) blaze out of the shadows. His face, set off by a stiff white collar, seems almost disembodied in the darkness, though his gold watch chain hints at his considerable girth. In this image, Steichen later said, he only slightly touched up Morgan’s nose, which was swollen from a skin disease. Yet Steichen denied having engineered the image’s most arresting aspect: the illusion of a dagger—actually the arm of the chair—in Morgan’s left hand.

Morgan tore up the proof on the spot.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/J-P-Morgan-as-Cutthroat-Capitalist.html#ixzz1JzhKEfW6

(edited to include "snips")

[Major Hogwash]

1. Morgan had a purple nose and was a large, heavy set man whose demeanor was not jolly

For a rich and powerful man, J.P. was mostly a bitter man, consumed and driven by the twin forces of an insatiable need for power and excess.
J.P's nose, large, bulbous, and nearly purple from the condition he suffered, added to his fierce countenance.
Most men would cowl in his presence because his personality was so forceful.
Often business meetings only lasted minutes because his business associates could hardly stand to be in his presence.
Deals were struck quickly just to get them over with.

That's a great link, thanks.
"Yet Steichen denied having engineered the image’s most arresting aspect: the illusion of a dagger—actually the arm of the chair—in Morgan’s left hand."

I didn't know that before.

Wiki also has a long entry about J.P.
It's sad to me that a man of such wealth and power was not more jolly, like good ol' St. Nick.

[goodnews]

2. Look at his hand gripping the chair!!!

This reveals a person afraid of losing control.

Famed muckraker Lincoln Stephens called him the "Boss of the United States". Few people know that the first thing Teddy Roosevelt, "The Trustbuster" did after entering the White House was hold a banquet in Morgan's honor. TR's administration was stocked with Morgan men, like Obama's is today full of Wall Streeters. Yet look at how history portrays TR as a man of the people and opposed to big business.

He was also a family values man, while always a strong supporter of religion, churchgoing etc. he had a mistress: Actress Maxine Elliot.

[SoCalDem]

3. Looks like he's gripping a big ole knife

:)

[goodnews]

8. I saw the original when researching Morgan. I like the knife, it fits well with

the demonic stare. Damn, that bastid was one of the worst.

[roguevalley]

4. he's a bastard's bastard. read about him if you have the stomach

[goodnews]

6. oops, self-delete.

[grahamhgreen]

5. Money hoarding is a disease.

[goodnews]

7. Hold on I say! Why Morgan pulled himself up by his bootstraps...

a self-made man. This is what the corporate managers of our perceptions want us to believe. The self-made man is an icon of American History that simply has very little basis in fact when it comes to the rich. Morgan got his nest egg, under the careful tutelage of his equally vile father Junius Spencer Morgan who himself was a partner of infamous financial tycoon George Peabody whose exploitations go back to the Jackson Era.

No individuals contributed so much to flooding our money markest with the evidences of our debt in Europe, and breaking down their prices and weakening financial confidence in our nationality than George Peabody and Company, and none made more money by the operation. All the money, and more, we presume, that Mr. Peabody is giving away so lavishly among our institutions of learning was gained by the speculations of his house in our misfortunes. (New York Times , October 31, 1866)

Note: The philanthropist is a strange bird in our history, bequeathments to get rid of their ill-gotten gains as the Pearly Gates beckon. After all: "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven".--Jesus Christ


JP engaged in some high stakes profiteering during the Civil War selling faulty rifles to the Union military and after they started blowing up in the soldiers faces, knocking off thumbs and other body parts, etc. the government refused to pay him. So Morgan hired a corporate lawyer took the government to court, a government very busy with war matters, and won the case and all of the money for the contract.

But this dirty son-of-a-bitch wasn't through. He got a replacement, for a measly 300 bucks, jokingly referred to as "the other JP", to take his place on the draft call. Morgan then got into speculating in Gold which changed value, often dramatically, with the tide of Union army advances and retreats. He'd take the gold offshore and bring it back when the price went up. Lincoln was so fucking mad when he was informed of this by one of his advisers he said: "I'd like to shoot their devilish heads off".

Lincoln was well aware of the ultimate goal of these capitalists, a goal realized in short order after his death, and came up with a brilliant strategy for fighting them: deny them the role of financiers of the government by putting the treasury back in charge of printing and issuing money as needed with no "middlemen"/private bankers charging interest. The brilliance lay in its simplicity; it was not, as so many other ideas put forward, going back on the gold standard. Lincoln knew the gold standard never had really existed and never could exist, but was used by the capitalists to contract and expand the economy as needed for THEIR profit. The Righties today as then loved to rally the ignorant masses to bring back the gold standard.

Excerpt from a book I'm working on:

In 1934 two authors Englbrecht and Hanigen wrote a book called the Merchants of Death that exposed an incredible horror story, a journey in history back to the 1500's of the international arms market. On Morgan's rifle deal they had this to say:

....The army had condemned as obsolete and dangerous some guns then in use known as Hall’s carbines. These guns were ordered sold at auction and they were disposed of at prices ranging from $1-2 dollars, probably as curios. In 1861 there still remained 5,000 of these condemned guns. Suddenly on May 28, 1861 one Arthur Eastman appeared and offered $3 apiece for them. This high price should have made the officials suspicious, but apparently it did not. Back of Eastman was a certain Simon Stevens who was furnishing the cash for the transaction, but the real broker was JP Morgan. …” (“Merchants of Death” (1934)p. 58-63)



In reporting to Congress, on March 3, 1863, the House Select Committee on Government Contracts, after submitting s great amount of testimony regarding the frauds during the war, concluded :
Many frauds have been exposed, the Government relieved from many unconscionable contracts, and millions of dollars saved to the treasury. Yet it is a matter of regret that punishment has not been meted out to the basest class of transgressors. They to whom this duty belonged seemed sadly to have neglected it. Worse than traitors in arms are the men pretending loyalty to the flag, who feast and fatten on the misfortune of the nation, while patriot blood is crimsoning the plains of the South, and bodies of their countrymen are mouldering in the dust. The leniency of the Government toward these men is a marvel which the present cannot appreciate, and history never explain. — House Reports, Committees and Courts of Claims, Third Session, Thirty-seventh Congress, 1862-63, Report No. 50:47.—But history can explain.


It was not to be expected that the very class controlling Government—the capitalist class—was to be proceeded against by its creature. In conclusion the Committee claimed that Morgan's actions: "a crime against the public safety"--p52. "Profits from the sales of arms to the government have been so enormous," said the investigating committee, "and realized by a system of brokerage as unprincipled and dishonest and unfriendly to the success of the nation, as the plotting of actual treason." (House reports I p. 34 , 1862, also Contained in Covey House of Morgan page 58-9)

It should be noted that Chernow's 1990 book House of Morgan is a whitewash--he hardly mentions the above and doesn't say one thing about the Morgan back coup attempt against FDR!


Crime and treason were the foundation upon which Morgan built his empire and became the "Boss of the United States". But so is the case for nearly all of the Robber Barons. Rockefeller got rich selling harnesses to the Union, Ogden Armour profiteering off of meat sales,

Speculating on their country's misfortunes.

We have in this country, wrote Cloud in "Monopolies and the People," published in 1873, a moneyed aristocracy, composed mainly of men who speculated in their country's misfortunes during the late Civil War, and who, under pretense of aiding the Government, made their twenty, fifty and one hundred per cent and amassed large fortunes by taking advantage of the tide of war as it submerged a nation's hopes. (p227)




By the turn of the century Morgan via monopoly decided who was lent money in the US. "You could not get a loan for over a million dollars" one writer said, "unless Morgan approved." Financially you could not do anything that went against his wishes and shortly after that he and his capitalist henchmen bought up the muckraker publications turning them into the "cotton candy" of journalism.

Upton Sinclair in his book "The Brass Check" cites how many muckraker publications turned into mush as WWI approached and the literature of exposure died, after the pigs who had been exposed, bought up publications doing the exposing. When the war came Sinclair and other critics went to jail.

Lincoln was well aware of the ultimate goal of these capitalists, a goal realized in short order after his death, and came up with a brilliant strategy for fighting them: deny them the role of financiers of the government. The brilliance lay in its simplicity, and no, it was not going back on the gold standard, something Lincoln knew never existed and never could exist, but was used by the capitalists to contract and expand the economy as needed.





In a burst of patriotism, J. P. Morgan once declared, "America is good enough for me!"
"And whenever he doesn't like it," William Jennings Bryan dryly remarked, "he can give it back to us."