Morgan: American Financier torrent

Morgan: American Financier - Jean Strouse [epub]

To farmers and laborers, Morgan was oppression itself, the man who made the industrial trusts that kept prices up and wages down. Morgan had an influential banker father, well-placed friends, financial acumen, prodigious energy, and a business climate conducive to the building of fortunes.

Jean Strouse is thorough and penetrating in her treatment of this titan of American banking. She softens the image of Morgan as a heartless tyrant and bloodsucker of the masses. She contends that Morgan merely behaved in the way that nature and aristocratic tradition dictated.

In the explosion of commercial activity in America following the Civil War, someone had to step in to harness the whirlwind. There were no laws, written or unwritten, capable of doing so. Thus the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers & the Goulds moved into the vacuum.

Morgan was religious, yet he kept mistresses. Although supremely self-confident, he was high-strung and prone to ailments such as boils, earaches, seizures and melancholy. Perhaps most telling, he worked his partners literally to death.

Paperback: 848 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 9, 2014)