The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

by Ron Chernow

For Pierpont, a gentleman wasn’t a rich man but a member of a social caste. He is associated with two statements about yachting that sum up his philosophy. The first is that “you can do business with anyone but you can only sail a boat with a gentleman,”3 and the second (perhaps apocryphal) that anyone who asked about the cost of maintaining a yacht shouldn’t buy one. He had no time for bounders or upstarts and despised the rich idle young men about town who pursued women in clubs and cafés. The Morgans would always be strong believers in the work ethic and the duties of the rich. They shunned the snobbish version of high society embodied by Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred”—supposedly the crème de la crème of New York society. In bluff, manly style, Pierpont would have thought their balls prissy or vulgar.