He fled to Europe, embarking on the White Star liner Oceanic. He had combined the White Star Line, the Red star Line, the American, Dominion, Atlantic Transport and Leyland lines into one company numbering 120 ocean-going ships. He despised competition no less on the seas than on land. He stood at night by the ship’s rail, hearing the heavy sea, feeling its swell but not seeing it. The sea and the sky were black and indistinguishable. A bird, some sort of gull, appeared from the blackness and lighted on the rail a few feet from him. Perhaps it had been attracted by his nose. I have no peers, Morgan said to the bird. It seemed an indisputable truth. Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world’s value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men. For his Episcopal brethren he would build a cathedral, St. John the Divine, on West 110th Street in New York. For his wife and grown children he would continue to provide an image of domestic stolidity. And for the shake of the country he would live in as grand a style as he could summon, dining with kings, or buying art in Rome and Paris, or consorting with beautiful companions at Aix-les-Bains.
Morgan had kept his vows. He spent six months of every year in Europe, moving in majesty from one country to another. The holds of his ships were filled with collections of paintings, rare manuscripts, first editions, jades, bronzes, autographs, tapestries, crystal. He looked into the eyes of Rembrandt burgher and Greco prelates as if to find kingdoms of truth that would bring him to his knees. He fingered the illustrated texts of rare Bibles of the Middle Ages as if to pick up dust from the City of God. He felt if there was something more than he knew, it lay in the past rather than in the present, of whose total bankruptcy of existence he was confident. He was the present. He employed curators to find him art and scholars to teach him of ancient civilizations. He beat his way back through the Flemish tapestries. He fondled Roman statuary. He strode through the Acropolis kicking the loose stones. His desperate studies settled, inevitably, on the civilizations of ancient Egypt, wherein it was taught that the universe is changeless and that death is followed by the resumption of life. He was fascinated. His life took a new turn. He funded Egyptian archaeological expeditions of the Metropolitan Museum. He followed the reclamation from the dry sands of every new stele, amulet and canopic jar containing viscera. He went to the valley of the Nile where the sun never fails to rise nor the river to flood its banks. He studied the hieroglyphs. One evening he left his hotel in Cairo and rode seven miles on a special streetcar to the site of the Great Pyramid. In the clear blue light of the moon he heard from a native guide of the wisdom given to the great Osiris that there is a sacred tribe of heroes, a colony from the gods who are regularly born in every age to assist mankind. The idea stunned him. The more he thought about it the more palpably he felt it. It was upon his return to America that he began to think about Henry Ford. He had no illusions that Ford was a gentleman. He recognized him for a shrewd provincial, as uneducated as a piece of wood. But he thought he saw in Ford’s use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism. Not only that: he had studied photographs of the automobile manufacturer and had seen an extraordinary resemblance to Seti I, the father of the great Ramses and the best-preserved mummy to have been unearthed from the necropolis of Thebes in the Valley of the Kings.
20
organ’s residence in New York City was No. 219 Madison Avenue, in Murray Hill, a stately brownstone on the northeast corner of 36th Street. Adjoining it was the white marble Morgan Library, which he had built to receive the thousands of books and art objects collected on his travels. It had been designed in the Italian Renaissance style by Charles McKim, a partner of Stanford White’s. The marble blocks were fitted without mortar. A snow fall darker than the stones of the Library lay on the streets the day Henry Ford
Morgan had ordered alight lunch. They did not say much as they dined without other company on Chincoteagues, bisque of terrapin, a Montrachet, rack of lamb, a Château Latour, fresh tomatoes and endives, rhubarb pie in heavy cream, and coffee. The service was magical, two of Morgan’s house staff making dishes appear and disappear with such self-effacement as to suggest no human agency. Ford ate well but he did not touch the wine. He finished before his host. He gazed frankly at the Morgan nose. He found a crumb on the tablecloth and deposited it in the saucer of his coffee cup. His fingers idly rubbed the gold plate.
At the conclusion of lunch Morgan indicated to Ford that he would like him to come to the Library. They walked out of the dining room and through a kind of dark public parlor where sat three or four men hoping to secure a few moments of Pierpont Morgan’s time. These were his lawyers. They were there to advise him on his forthcoming appearance before the House Committee on Banking and Finance then sitting in Washington for the purpose of inquiring into the possibility that a money trust existed in the United States. Morgan waved the lawyers away as they rose upon sight of him. There was also in attendance an art dealer in a morning coat who had traveled from Rome expressly to see him. The dealer rose only to bow.
None of this display was lost on Ford. He was a man of homespun tastes but was not at all put off by what he recognized as an empire different only in style from his own. Morgan brought him to the great West Room of the Library. Here they took chairs on opposite sides of a fireplace that was as tall as a man. It was a good day for a fire, Morgan said. Ford agreed. Cigars were offered. Ford refused. He noticed the ceiling was gilded. The walls were covered in red silk damask. There were fancy paintings hanging behind glass in heavy frames. — pictures of yellowish soulful-looking people with golden haloes. He guessed nobody had their pictures made in those days who wasn’t a saint. There was a madonna and child. He ran his fingers along the arm of his chair of red plush.
Morgan let him take it all in. He puffed on his cigar. Finally he spoke. Ford, he said gruffly, I have no interest in acquiring your business or in sharing its profits. Nor am I associated with any of your competitors. Ford nodded. I have to allow that is good news, he said, giving off a sly glance. Nevertheless, his host continued, I admire what you have done, and while I must have qualms about a motorcar in the hands of every mongoloid who happens to have a few hundred dollars to spend, I recognize that the future is yours. You’re still a young man — fifty years or thereabouts? — and perhaps you understand as I cannot the need to separately mobilize the masses of men. I have spent my life in the coordination of capital resources and the harmonic combination of industries, but I never considered the possibility that the employment of labor is in itself a harmonically unifying process apart from the enterprise in which it is enlisted. Let me ask you a question. Has it occurred to you that your assembly line is not merely a stroke of industrial genius but a projection of organic truth? After all, the interchangeability of parts is a rule of nature. Individuals participate in their species and in their genus. All mammals reproduce in the same way and share the same designs of self-nourishment, with digestive and circulatory systems that are recognizable the same, and they enjoy the same senses. Obviously this is not to say all mammals have interchangeable parts, as your automobiles. But shared design is what allows taxonomists to classify mammals as mammals. And within a species — man, for example — the rules of nature operate so that our individual differences occur on the basis of our similarity. So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone.