THE ARCHIVIST

Belle da Costa Greene's hidden story.

- HILTON ALS

The tale of J. P. Morgan's librarian is part of the sad legacy of passing in America.

The American industrialist and financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) was a serious collector of objects, books, and ephemera for most of his life, and his avidity and the diversity of the materials he acquired-from pages of a fourteenth-century Iraqi Quran to the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"-are a testament to both his American determinism and his wide-ranging tastes. One of the founders of U.S. Steel, and a key figure in the creation of General Electric, Morgan, who helped President Grover Cleveland avert a national financial disaster, in 1895, by defending the gold standard, didn't have much patience for those who felt there were things that couldn't get done. Jean Strouse, in her extraordinary, definitive biography "Morgan: American Financier" (1999), describes a man whose physical attributes (broad shoulders, penetrating gaze), febrile mind, and seemingly inexhaustible energy became synonymous with the outsized, overstuffed Gilded Age.