23 Wall Street

• Share

Advertising pays just as liberally in Wall Street as elsewhere. Gilded on its windows or carved on its lintels, appear the names of countless bankers and brokers, all just as anxious to impress the passer-by with their particular names as firms are anywhere else. Even the Stock Exchange and the Chamber of Commerce feel it necessary to label themselves quite plainly for the benefit of the man in the street.

On the southeast corner of Wall and Broad streets, however, there is a low, massive building with no label at all. Over its door one sees " 23 Wall Street"—that is all. Not to know it, however, argues yourself unknown, for this is the office of J.P. Morgan & Co.

Nothing is quite so impressive as complete impersonality. Perhaps a leading reason why the firm of J. P. Morgan & Co. is so often accused of completely illogical and ridiculous things—such as starting panics and thereby depreciating its own securities and properties—is the contrast which this building affords to its neighbors and its generally bland, inscrutable and complete impersonality.

The personality of Mr. J. P. Morgan himself is as indefinite a conception in the public mind as the identity of his office to the tourist in Wall Street. Like the latter, he is thought of as substantial, powerful, unobtrusive—and there one stops. He seems more an institution than a human being with likes and dislikes, habits, abilities.

The question usually asked about the present Mr. Morgan is whether he is " as able as his father." Without attempting an answer to this natural query, it must be recognized that the period from 1880 to 1910 was fundamentally different from the period from 1910 to 1923, and that the qualities which were called for in practical and successful finance were quite different than those demanded at the present time. The former period was one of inevitable consolidations and mergers in both the railroad and industrial fields; the times in which the former J. P. Morgan proved preeminent called for dominant willpower, great audacity of vision and action. Great personalities in finance and in business arose because individual leadership was imperative.