Word: morgan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Morgan, a titan of the 19th century who helped set the stage for the 20th (see following article), acted in his day as a cross between today's Federal Reserve Board and the Goldman Sachs' mergers-and-acquisitions department, providing the money and acumen needed to launch the prototypes of modern industrial corporations. Under Morgan's leadership, this century began much as the 19th century ended, with heavy industry--steel, rails, electricity, and oil--ascendant. Automobiles were in short supply until 1913, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line and mass production, making ours a consumer as well...
Three men--Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan--personified this sweeping turn-of-the-century transformation. Imbued with all the greed, guile and enterprise of the age, they exhibited a bullish faith in America's future despite the depressions, strikes and financial panics that punctuated these tumultuous years. In their different ways, each dealt a mortal blow to the small-scale economy of the early republic, fostering vast industries that forever altered the size and scope of the nation's business...
After selling his empire to J.P. Morgan in 1901 to form the centerpiece of the new behemoth, U.S. Steel, Carnegie devoted himself to good deeds. A prodigious philanthropist, he created 2,800 free libraries worldwide. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," he declared bluntly. Like Rockefeller, Carnegie endowed large corporate foundations with elastic charters that took on an autonomous existence. At his death he had disbursed almost his entire $350 million fortune...
...Rockefeller and Carnegie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913) financed it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street--his nickname was Jupiter--Morgan had a thunderclap voice, a ferocious glare and a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become "part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Carnegie endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford, Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and exquisite art was legendary...
After studying in Switzerland and Germany, the cosmopolitan young Morgan arrived on Wall Street in 1857, serving as agent for his father Junius Spencer Morgan, who had taken over a London merchant bank. Though Pierpont participated in refinancing the Civil War debt in the 1870s, he acquired true imperial status in underwriting America's railroads...