A Brill Calendar: April 17

High Finance and "JPM"

Few names put a spell on all ‘haute finance’ for so long as ‘John Pierpont Morgan’.

It concerns two individuals, father and son. JPM Senior - born on April 17 1837and dying in Rome, Italy, on March 31 1913 – passed his empire to his son & namesake who ruled it for thirty more years. As always, the tenet of a ‘creatio ex nihilo’ doesn’t apply. Senior boasted a sire who was no stranger in the Jerusalem of early American capitalism: this Junius Spencer Morgan (1813 – 1890) acted already as private banker before iron rails and steam started to transform the physical and mental landscape in subcontinent.

With 2008’s financial ‘Götterdämmerung’ in mind, it takes little effort to depict American tycoons ruling whole industrial branches with ruthless greed as villains; and indeed some perseverance is needed to find among peers of ‘JPM’ – with surnames like Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, or Huntington – any thoroughly charming individuals. However, they vanished into legend accompanied by other and very different American Senior-Junior couples; such as two gentlemen both called Oliver Wendell Holmes, who were prominent from 1809 until 1935.

Holmes Senior became Dean of Harvard Medical School – quite a feat for a humorist read nation-wide, and an essayist and poet. His ‘Breakfast Table’ Series, featuring the Autocrat, the Professor and the Poet - all three types at elegant ease in his suave self - reflects the idealism and optimism of a young nation after a decisive Civil War.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, ‘The Great Dissenter’, earned in his long life (two days short of 95 years) as Justice of the United States Supreme Court admiring love of countless lawyers, judges and scholars ever since. When asked in the early ‘thirties of the 20th century, by a recently inaugurated President, Franklin Roosevelt, why Justice Holmes was reading Plato, the old gentleman, well over ninety, answered: ‘To improve my mind, Mr President’. It is seldom that what remains best in American culture was more succinctly expressed.