New York - The Novel

place was busy as usual. Fellows in dark coats, rushing in and out of the Exchange with orders stuck into the bands of their high hats. Clerks hastening to their high stools and their desks. Messenger boys, street vendors, cabs delivering merchant gentlemen like himself. It was the old New York, wasn’t it?
    No. Not really. Not any more.
    He passed a stern and bulky building. Number 23. The House of Drexel, Morgan. And as he passed, it was all he could do not to bow the head. Yes he, one of the Masters, friends to Stuyvesants and Roosevelts, Astors and Vanderbilts, must experience a trembling of awe as he passed the offices of Morgan. That was the trouble. That was why he didn’t belong here any more.
    But his son Tom did. And a few moments later, he came to his door.

    “Father. An unexpected pleasure.” Tom pushed his big chair back from his roll-top desk. His tailcoat was hanging on a stand. But his gray waistcoat was as spotless as his white shirt, his silk cravat and the pearl pin that held it in place. Everything about him told you: this man does not handle goods, he only handles money. Tom was not a mere merchant like his ancestors; he was a banker.
    “Got a moment?” said his father.
    “For you, of course.” Tom didn’t need to say he was busy. The gold watch chain across his waistcoat told you his time was valuable.
    “I need some advice,” said Frank.
    “Glad to help,” said Tom. But in his eye, like a clergyman whose parishioner asks to see him alone, was a faint suggestion of caution, and impending judgment.
    That was the trouble with bankers, thought Master. A merchant wants to know about the deal. A banker wants the money just as much, but he has appointed himself the enforcing conscience of the tradesman, and therefore affects an air of superiority. His son Tom was in his forties now, silky smooth and stinking rich and pompous.
    Oh well, he needed his advice, and at least he wouldn’t be charged for it.
    “I own ten percent of a railroad,” said Frank.
    Then he stared at his son in surprise. He hadn’t said it to impress—he’d just stated a simple fact. Yet the transformation in Tom was remarkable.
    “Ten percent of a railroad?” Tom was all attention. “How big a railroad?”
    “Middling sized.”
    “I see. Might I ask which one?” There was a politeness in Tom’s voice that his father had never heard before.
    “That’s confidential for the moment.”
    “As you wish.”
    There was no question—he could see it in Tom’s eyes: he was being treated with a new respect. Even his moral status seemed to have improved. It was as if the clergyman had been faced not with a vulgar tradesman, but a serious donor. Seeing his new situation, Frank did not fail to improve upon it.
    “My ten percent,” he said quietly, “gives me the balance of control.”
    Tom leaned back in his chair and gazed at his father with love. It was as if, Frank thought, all his sins had suddenly been remitted, and he was entering Heaven through the Pearly Gates.
    “Why, Father,” said his son, “this is exactly what we do here.” His face broke into a smile. “Welcome to Wall Street.”

    It was the Civil War that had really changed Wall Street. The Civil War and the American West. Massive flows of capital were needed to finance the one, and to develop the other. And where was capital to be found? In one place only, the money center of the whole world: London.
    It was London that had bankrolled America. Just as the century before, the economy of America had grown on the great triangle of London, New York and the West Indies sugar trade—and later on the Southern cotton trade—now a new, less visible, but equally powerful engine was making the running: the flow of credit and of stocks between London and New York.
    That’s where the House of Morgan had arisen. Junius Morgan, a respectable Connecticut gentleman whose Welsh ancestors had taken ship from Bristol to America two centuries before, had returned across theocean and set up as a banker in London. He was liked, he was trusted, he was in the right place at the right time, and he had the intelligence to see it. He arranged loans from London to America, and those loans grew huge. In the course of this steady, respectable business, he’d become a very rich man.
    But it was his son, John Pierpont Morgan, who was at the helm now. Over six feet tall, big-chested, with a great nose that would flare up like a swelling volcano when he was agitated, and