50 Fun Facts About J. P. Morgan

What did the initials in J. P. Morgan's name stand for?

John Pierpont: Pierpont was his mother's maiden name and the name he actually went by, which is why his own library still calls him Pierpont Morgan.

In which New England city was J. P. Morgan born and, 75 years later, buried?

Hartford: he left at 14 and died abroad, but his funeral procession passed the Asylum Street house where he was born on its way to the family plot in Cedar Hill Cemetery.

J. P. Morgan's uncle James composed which famous American song in the 1850s?

Jingle Bells: his mother's brother published it in 1857 as 'One Horse Open Sleigh', possibly as a drinking song, and it took decades to become a Christmas standard.

In 1901 Morgan merged Andrew Carnegie's business with others to form which company, the world's first billion-dollar corporation?

U.S. Steel: Morgan paid $480 million for Carnegie's company without haggling and congratulated him on becoming 'the richest man in the world'.

During which crisis did Morgan gather New York's bankers in his library and force them to agree a rescue?

The Panic of 1907: Morgan locked the bankers in until they agreed to a rescue, and the sight of one private citizen saving the system led Congress to create the Federal Reserve.

Morgan had booked a luxury suite with a private promenade deck on which ship's maiden voyage, but changed his plans?

RMS Titanic: his shipping trust owned the liner's parent company, and he cancelled at the last minute, reportedly because of illness.

Which inventor did Morgan give $150,000 to build a trans-Atlantic wireless station at Wardenclyffe?

Nikola Tesla then scaled the scheme up to wireless power for the whole world, Morgan refused to put in another cent, and the site was abandoned by 1906.

The 1920 bomb that killed 38 people outside J.P. Morgan & Co.'s Wall Street headquarters arrived in what?

A horse-drawn wagon carried the dynamite and iron sash weights; the crime was never solved, and the bank refused to repair the shrapnel scars, which still pit the building's wall.

Morgan avoided serving in the Civil War by doing what, as the law then allowed?

Paying a substitute $300: the 1863 draft law let any drafted man buy his way out, which is why critics called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

The Hall Carbine Affair of 1861, which dogged Morgan's reputation, involved a loan used to buy rifles resold to which Union general?

John C. Frémont: the government had sold the carbines off as surplus for $3.50 each, and within months his army was buying them back at $22 apiece.

Morgan's career leapt forward when he quietly sold 250,000 New York Central shares for which railroad heir?

William Vanderbilt wanted the sale made without driving down the price; Morgan managed it and took a seat on the New York Central board, an early step toward dominating the railroads.

Which Philadelphia financier became Morgan's mentor and partner in 1871, forming the firm that became J.P. Morgan & Co.?

Anthony Drexel: the firm bore his name first, as Drexel, Morgan and Company, and took Morgan's alone only after his death; the Philadelphia university he founded still carries it.

Morgan's father Junius made his career in London as a partner of which American-born merchant banker?

George Peabody: born poor in Massachusetts, he became the model for later philanthropists, and the trust he founded still houses thousands of Londoners.

Which electrical giant did Morgan create by merging Thomas Edison's company with its rival Thomson-Houston?

General Electric: it was the first of Morgan's great industrial mergers, and it took Edison's name off the company the inventor had founded.

In 1895 Morgan and the Rothschilds supplied gold to rescue the US Treasury under which president?

Grover Cleveland was sceptical until Morgan cited an obscure 1862 statute that let the Treasury buy gold with bonds without going to Congress.

Which president ordered the antitrust suit that broke up Morgan's Northern Securities railroad combine in 1904?

Theodore Roosevelt stunned Wall Street by turning a little-used antitrust law on Morgan's combine; business leaders had counted on the hands-off approach of earlier presidents.

Morgan suffered a rare defeat in 1902 when transit magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes blocked his plan to build a line on what?

The London Underground: Yerkes's backers quietly bought out Morgan's tramway partner, sinking the bill, and Morgan called it 'the greatest rascality and conspiracy I ever heard of'.

Morgan belonged to which exclusive Georgia island club, where bankers secretly drafted the Federal Reserve plan in 1910?

Jekyll Island: the six men travelled there under cover of a duck hunt, and the Fed's own historians think it was most likely Morgan who arranged the use of the club.

In December 1912 Morgan testified before which congressional inquiry into the 'money trust'?

The Pujo Committee reported that Morgan's circle held 341 directorships in 112 corporations worth over $22 billion, findings that fed demands for a central bank and tougher antitrust law.

Morgan died in his sleep in March 1913 in which city?

Rome: he was on his way home from a trip to Egypt, taken soon after he testified to Congress, when he died in a hotel there; his body crossed the Atlantic on the liner France.

Which institution stayed shut until noon on the day of J. P. Morgan's funeral?

The New York Stock Exchange: flags on Wall Street flew at half-staff too, a farewell to the private banker who had twice come to the rescue of the US Treasury.

Which English painter's 'Duchess of Devonshire', stolen in 1876, did Morgan buy when it resurfaced in 1901?

Thomas Gainsborough: the thief kept the portrait for 25 years, then handed it back through Pinkerton detectives in Chicago to the dealer he had robbed, who promptly sold it to Morgan.

Morgan's bulbous purple nose, a condition called rhinophyma, was the result of which common skin disorder?

Rosacea: Morgan was so self-conscious that he had his official portraits retouched, and one famous photograph shows him raising his cane at a cameraman.

Morgan's son-in-law believed he avoided surgery on his nose for fear which childhood ailment would return?

Seizures: Morgan had suffered them as an infant, and although surgeons of his day could have pared the growth away, Herbert Satterlee guessed that this fear held him back.

Morgan's first wife Amelia Sturges died four months after their 1861 wedding of what?

Tuberculosis: Memie was already so ill at their 1861 wedding that Morgan carried her to the ceremony, then took her to Algiers hoping the warm air would save her.

Morgan's succession of steam yachts all bore what name?

Corsair: the second yacht fought at Santiago in 1898 as the Navy gunboat USS Gloucester, and an 1885 railroad truce struck on board the first became known as the Corsair Compact.

Morgan, a commodore of the New York Yacht Club, led the syndicate behind Columbia, twice winner of which trophy?

The America's Cup: Columbia beat Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock in 1899 and Shamrock II in 1901, the first two of the tea magnate's five failed challenges.

When New York's Union Club blackballed his friend, Morgan founded a rival club and had which architect design it?

Stanford White gave Morgan an Italian Renaissance palazzo on Fifth Avenue, and the rejected friend, railroad president John King, was invited in as a founding member.

Morgan served as president of which New York institution from 1904, having been a founding member?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art received thousands of his objects in 1917, four years after his death, when his son Jack gave it about two-fifths of the collection.

Who did J. P. Morgan Jr. appoint as first director when he made his father's library a public institution in 1924?

Belle da Costa Greene had run the collection since 1905, spending millions on rare books while concealing that she was a Black woman passing as white.

Morgan's gem collections, assembled by Tiffany's George Frederick Kunz, were donated to which institution?

The American Museum of Natural History: the gift included the Star of India sapphire, which burglars stole from its gem hall in 1964 and police recovered from a bus-station locker in Miami.

Morgan's library is the only institution in the world to own three copies of which landmark printed book?

The Gutenberg Bible: Morgan bought rare books by the collection rather than the copy, swallowing three whole private libraries between 1899 and 1902 alone.

Morgan paid photographer Edward S. Curtis $75,000 in 1906 to document what?

Native American peoples: Morgan's money covered only the fieldwork for The North American Indian, so Curtis worked unpaid for more than two decades on a project that outlived his patron.

Which law forced the House of Morgan to spin off Morgan Stanley in 1935?

The Glass–Steagall Act: the Morgan bank chose to go on taking deposits, so Morgan's grandson Henry and partner Harold Stanley left to open the securities firm.

According to a former Parker Brothers executive, J. P. Morgan was the model for the mascot of which board game?

Monopoly: artist Daniel Fox drew the top-hatted Rich Uncle Pennybags for the game's cards in 1936, and his authorship was forgotten until a grandchild came forward in 2013.

Morgan is believed to be the model for Walter Parks Thatcher, the cold guardian in which Orson Welles film?

Citizen Kane: producer John Houseman said the banker was loosely based on Morgan, and in the film Thatcher, played by George Coulouris, takes the boy Kane from his mother's boarding house.

After a Swiss boarding school, the young Morgan studied at which German university?

Göttingen: he did so well there that a professor urged him to stay on as an academic, but he left in 1857 to become a banker like his father.

Which illness struck the teenage Morgan in 1852, leaving him for a time unable to walk?

Rheumatic fever: his father shipped the 15-year-old off to the Azores, where he spent almost a year recovering before he could go back to school.

Morgan's grandfather Joseph co-founded which insurance company?

Aetna: Joseph Morgan, who left a farm to run a tavern and then a hotel, helped found the insurer, and two generations later his grandson's bank counted it among the firms it controlled.

In 2005 the bank Morgan founded apologised because two lenders it had absorbed once took enslaved people as collateral in which state?

Louisiana: Citizens Bank and Canal Bank accepted about 13,000 enslaved people as collateral between 1831 and 1865, and came to own some 1,250 of them when planters defaulted.

Morgan was senior warden of St. George's in Manhattan and a leading lay figure in which church?

Episcopal: St. George's became so identified with its most influential parishioner that New Yorkers called it 'Morgan's Church', and his funeral was held there in 1913.

Morgan's London mansion at Prince's Gate later housed US ambassadors, among them the father of which future president?

John F. Kennedy: his father Joseph moved in as ambassador in the late 1930s, one of eight envoys to use the house that Morgan's son had offered to the American government.

As a young clerk in New Orleans, Morgan risked his firm's money on a stranded shipload of what?

Coffee: he bought the whole cargo without permission and sold it on to local merchants at a profit, earning a stern rebuke from his employers and the nerve to strike out alone.

Morgan financed the 1902 merger of McCormick and Deering that created which farm-machinery giant?

International Harvester: Morgan partner George Perkins put the deal together to end the competition between the reaper makers, and Morgan's bank supplied the money.

Morgan bought the original handwritten manuscript of which Charles Dickens story, still kept at his library?

A Christmas Carol: Dickens had the manuscript bound in red leather as a present for his solicitor, and it passed through several dealers' hands before Morgan bought it.

J. P. Morgan appears as a character, obsessed with Egypt and reincarnation, in which E. L. Doctorow novel?

Ragtime: Doctorow has Morgan find a kindred spirit in Henry Ford, and the story's climax comes when the pianist Coalhouse Walker's gang seizes Morgan's library and wires it with dynamite.

Which architect designed Morgan's marble library beside his New York home, built between 1902 and 1906?

Charles McKim fitted its marble blocks so precisely that they needed no mortar, an uncommon method that added $50,000 to the bill, which Morgan readily agreed to pay.

Before his schooling in Europe, Morgan attended the English High School in which American city?

Boston: the school specialised in mathematics for boys headed into commerce, and Morgan, an indifferent pupil until then, began earning better grades there.

In 1885 Morgan brokered a truce between the New York Central and which rival railroad, reportedly aboard his yacht?

The Pennsylvania Railroad: Morgan sailed its chiefs and their New York Central rivals up and down the Hudson, refusing to dock until each agreed to stay out of the other's territory.

J.P. Morgan & Co. merged in 2000 with which other New York bank to create today's banking giant?

Chase Manhattan: the merged bank kept both names, and its Chase side descends from a water company Aaron Burr set up in 1799 as a cover for opening a bank.