J.P. Morgan 1837-1913
A real angry J.P. Morgan. He hated being photographed. In many of his photographs it looks like he wants to eat you. He was a scary man to deal with. Although he was often a real pussycat under the gruff exterior.
He was a genius in the financial world. He had a good sense of humor. He sometimes would sing. He would even every now and then did a "sailors hornpipe"....He was the power behind many things, Thomas Edison, US Steel, IMM, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and so much more.
He is one of the more misunderstood figures in American history. Thomas Edison once wrote of Morgan saying "his word was his collateral"..That says a lot from the Wizard of Menlo Park...But Edison knew that was very much the truth.
Morgan had a credo "Think a lot, say little, write nothing". Clever and very true.
To Morgan his image and integrity was everything.
There is much to write on him and I will in several stories in the future.
One person once described Morgan's glare as looking into the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. He was famous for it. Also his nose.
I have gone to wikipedia to use a little of their info on his nose...............
He often had a tremendous physical effect on people; one man said that a visit from Morgan left him feeling "as if a gale had blown through the house." Morgan was physically large with massive shoulders, piercing eyes and a purple nose, because of a childhood skin disease, rosacea. His grotesquely deformed nose was due to a disease called rhinophyma, which is the end result of acne rosacea. As the deformity worsens, pits, nodules, fissures, lobulations, and pedunculation contort the nose into grotesque cosmetic problems. This condition inspired the taunt "Johny Morgan's nasal organ has a purple hue."
Surgeons could have shaved away the rhinophymous growth of sebaceous tissue during Morgan's lifetime, but as a child Morgan suffered from infantile seizures, and it is suspected that he did not seek surgery for his nose because he feared the seizures would return. His social and professional self-confidence were too well established to be undermined by this affliction. It appeared as if he dared people to meet him squarely and not shrink from the sight, asserting the force of his character over the ugliness of his face. He was known to dislike publicity and hated being photographed; as a result of his self-consciousness of his rosacea, all of his professional portraits were retouched.
Morgan owned IMM, which was owned through US Steel in New Jersey. Now that does not sound like much till you think of what IMM was. It was a shipping company. One of the companies in that grouping was the White Star Line. That may not mean anything either...But what was the star ship of the White Star Line? The Titanic!
Yes J.P. Morgan owned the Titanic. It was American owned, just sailed under the British Flag as the company was based in England. But totally American owned.
The shock of that, age, blood pressure, depression, and the many court cases dealing with that,led to his death in 1913.......
More on this great man later...