Transcript
Introduction
These industrialists accumulated their wealth in ways most Americans could understand. They dug up something. They discovered something. They built something. But the financiers backing these industrialists, as Americans were just learning, found their riches in the flow of money itself. Morgan was the most influential of these businessmen. He wasn't the richest, by most accounts, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were. But that didn't matter.
He was commanding in ways none could match. Wherever he sat, he became the head of the table. He was comfortable in his dominion though never with his fame. He had an aristocrat's disdain for public sentiment and the conviction that his actions were to the country's advantage, no explanations necessary. Roosevelt thought big business was not only inevitable but essential. He also believed it had to be accountable to the public, and Roosevelt considered himself to be the public. Each presumed he could use his authority to determine the nation's course. Each expected deference from the other along the way. Morgan and Roosevelt both knew privilege and loss, though they would have balked if anyone had pointed out their similarities.
The president aimed to guarantee that as American prosperity took hold, the laws applied to the country's elite and its poor alike. He wanted to assert diplomacy of government over business. The financier thought that was needless, even dangerous. The country's strength accrued from capital, trade, economic efficiency. These were the provinces of businessmen and Morgan, their unofficial ruler. He required order and stability along with political predictability to assure America's growth and ascent to global power.
To Morgan, the giant railroad and steel companies he was constructing would allow the country to compete in the world market and its citizens to benefit. The pace and scale of these operations shouldn't be cause for worry or resentment and certainly not regulation. "I'm afraid of Mr. Roosevelt because I don't know what he'll do," Morgan said. "He's afraid of me because he does know what I'll do," Roosevelt said. Roosevelt and Morgan were bound for conflict. Roosevelt was a new kind of president. He believed American capitalism needed a guiding hand. So did Morgan. Each assumed it should be his own.
So that's an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is, The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism, and it was written by Susan Berfield. So before I jump into the book, I want to read this one paragraph description that is found on the inside flap, and it gives you an overview of what the author's focus is. It said, "A bullet from an anarchist's gun put an end to the business-friendly presidency of William McKinley, a new chief executive bounded into the office, Theodore Roosevelt."