The House of Morgan
by Ron Chernow
Summary
The House of Morgan is the story of American finance told through its most powerful name, a history of the Morgan banking empire from its Victorian London origins to the takeover battles of the 1980s, and it was, astonishingly, Ron Chernow's first book. At its center stands Pierpont Morgan, the glowering colossus who reorganized the railroads, created US Steel, and in the panic of 1907 acted as the country's central bank in his own library, locking the bankers in until they pledged the money; around him Chernow builds the whole dynasty, the pious founding father Junius, the son Jack who inherited the firm in time for the World War, when the House of Morgan financed the Allies, and the partners who ran what the book calls the most secretive and most trusted institution on Wall Street. The second half follows the empire's dismemberment: the Pecora hearings that put the partners in the dock after the Crash, the Glass Steagall Act that split the house into J.P. Morgan and the new Morgan Stanley, and loosened its hold on London's Morgan Grenfell, and the descendants' separate paths down to the modern markets, where the aristocratic banking culture the Morgans embodied finally dissolved. Chernow writes finance as human drama without ever simplifying the finance, and reviewers reached for comparisons to the epic novel. The book won the 1990 National Book Award for Nonfiction, launched the career that went on to Rockefeller, Washington, Grant, and the Hamilton biography that became the musical, and it remains the best single history of American banking's first century.
Historical Context & Significance
Chernow published the book in 1990, in the wreckage of the 1980s takeover decade, when the old question of what banks owe the societies that charter them had turned newly urgent, and readers took the Pecora and Glass Steagall chapters as commentary on their own moment. The 1990 National Book Award for a debut set Chernow on the path to becoming one of America's most read biographers. The book's afterlife kept growing: when Glass Steagall was repealed in 1999 and the 2008 crisis followed, both sides of the argument quoted its history, and Lin Manuel Miranda's later encounter with Chernow's Hamilton made its author a household name, but bankers themselves still treat this first book as the house history, the place their own industry goes to read where it came from.