Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [42]
19
But Ford’s achievement did not put him at the top of the business pyramid. Only one man occupied that lofty place.
The offices of the J. P. Morgan Company were at 23 Wall Street. The great financier came to work one morning dressed in a dark blue suit, a black overcoat with a collar of lamb’s wool and a top hat. He affected fashions slightly out of date. When he stepped out of his limousine the car robe fell around his feet. One of the several bank officers who had rushed out to meet him disentangled the robe and hung it over the robe rail on the inside of the door. The chauffeur thanked him profusely. Somehow the speaking tube had come off its hook and another officer of the bank replaced it. In the meantime Morgan had marched into the building, assistants, aides and even some of the firm’s customers circling him like birds. Morgan carried a gold-headed cane. He was at this time in his seventy-fifth year of life—a burly six-footer with a large head of sparse white hair, a white moustache and fierce intolerant eyes set just close enough to suggest the psy-chopathology of his will. Accepting the obeisances of his employees, he strode to his office, a modest glass-paneled room on the main floor of the bank where he was visible to everyone and everyone to him. He was helped with his hat and coat. He was wearing a wing collar and an ascot. He sat down behind his desk, and ignoring the depositors’ accounts which were usually the first thing he looked at, said to his aides I want to meet that tinkering fellow. What’s his name. The motorcar mechanic. Ford.
He had sensed in Ford’s achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet. Pierpont Morgan was that classic American hero, a man born to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and ruthlessness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight. He controlled 741 directorships in 112 corporations. He had once arranged a loan to the United States Government that had saved it from bankruptcy. He had single-handedly stopped the panic of 1907 by arranging for the importation of one hundred million dollars in gold bullion. Moving about in private railroad cars or yachts he crossed all borders and was at home everywhere in the world. He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted. Commanding resources that beggared royal fortunes, he was a revolutionist who left to presidents and kings their territory while he took control of their railroads and shipping lines, banks and trust companies, industrial plants and public utilities. For years he had surrounded himself with parties of friends and acquaintances, always screening them in his mind for the personal characteristics that might indicate less regard for him than they admitted. He was invariably disappointed. Everywhere men deferred to him and women shamed themselves. He knew as no one else the cold and barren reaches of unlimited success. The ordinary operations of his intelligence and instinct over the past fifty years had made him preeminent in the affairs of nations and he thought this said little for mankind. Only one thing served to remind Pierpont Morgan of his humanity and that was a chronic skin disease that had colonized his nose and made of it a strawberry of the award-winning giant type grown by California