I'm sure the editors of that magazine travelled out there ALL the time in the '30s.

'One feels if he could both teach and learn if he could cross the Mississippi frequently and meet the people that largely make up America.' - wrote The New Yorker, referring to Jack. And this was back in the days when it was still publicly acceptable to say that you wouldn't do business with firms like Kuhn, Loeb, Sigmund Warburg or Charles Schwab because they were Jewish-which he and his father both did. There are excellent little details all around that you wouldn't get from other history books-like Jack Morgan reading his grandkids 'A Christmas Carol' on Christmas Eve (having purchased Dickens' original manuscript for it, of course). Talk about a nice job if you could get it. But there are also gentlemen scholars like Tom Lamont, quasi-statesmen who got to interact with the some of the most elite power circles of the age. There are the towering, titanic figures of Pierpont Morgan and Jack Morgan, of course. His exhaustive research into private letters and statements especially humanizes Wall Street in a way that few others have matched since its first edition appeared 25 years ago in 1989. In a time when most of us don't think much about finance history except back to the beginning of our careers, books like 'The House of Morgan' are more important than ever to get a glimpse of our place in Wall Street history.Īuthor Ron Chernow has put the legendary House of Morgan in terms we all will hopefully understand: through people. But it was a doorstop that made many of my morning commutes pass by, with a riveting combination of history, politics, economics, and finance that tells the story of the world's most famous American bank. 'A man has two reasons for the things he does: one that sounds good, and the real one.' - Pierpont MorganĪt over 700 pages, 'The House of Morgan' is a book that could be used as a doorstop.

The house of morgan book