BANKING: The Name of Morgan

• Share

In its 80-year career in international banking, J. P. Morgan & Co. (and its predecessors) has done business with presidents, kings, prime ministers. Many a tycoon has gone to its solemn marble hall at 23 Wall St. with hat humbly in hand.

In its seven-year career at selling oil burners, J. P. Morgan & Co., Inc. has had few hats doffed to it. Into its headquarters, in a dun-colored, two-story frame house in Queens, across the noisome East River from Manhattan, have walked no tycoons, no diplomats, no emissaries of anxious U. S. Presidents; only an occasional customer. Most of the stir in its hall has been made by the young son of the company's proprietor, James P. Morgan. The pot-holed cinder street in front of the house is deserted.

Yet fortnight ago, obscure, unprosperous J. P. Morgan & Co., Inc., by virtue of a New York law giving a corporation exclusive right to its own name, found itself blocking the way of the great House of Morgan, like an unsuspected carpet tack under the tire of a Rolls-Royce. For the House of Morgan, hitherto a partnership, had decided to incorporate as a State bank as a protection from capital withdrawals when partners die, and also to make itself eligible for trust business (TIME, Feb. 26). The name it had chosen was its own, J. P. Morgan & Co., Inc. Thirtyish, thin-haired, energetic Morgan of Queens promptly riveted his right to his corporate name by paying a bill for delinquent taxes back to 1937, sat down to see what Morgan of Manhattan would do about it.

The New York Legislature gave him his answer. Through Assembly and Senate went a bill. Its one provision: to permit a private banking house, notwithstanding any other statute to the contrary, to keep its old name under incorporation. Over the telegraphed protest of counsel for Morgan of Queens, Governor Lehman, onetime partner of Lehman Bros., signed the bill for the relief of his fellow bankers.

Said Morgan of Queens: "All right—let's put it in the worst light; let's say I paid my taxes to make Morgan trouble. Well, I had a right to. I was incorporated in 1933. My name is my personal property."

Meanwhile, from "The Corner" on Wall Street came an announcement which assured Morgan of Queens that his name would not be completely duplicated. The corporate House of Morgan will be known as J. P. Morgan & Co., Incorporated (spelled out).