The story of Pierpont Morgan is that of a young moralist turned despot, one who believed implicitly in the correctness of his views. Strong-willed and opinionated, he had an unshakable faith in his own impulses—a quality that later made him appear as a force of nature, a child of the Zeitgeist, making snap decisions that were often eerily right. He differed from most of the Gilded Age robber barons in that their rapacity stemmed from pure greed or lust for power while his included some strange admixture of idealism.
