JP Morgan was an affluential person in American society. Born to a wealthy family, he was able to get a good education, and was brought up in the world of business and wealth from a very young age. While his motives are questionable, there is no question of his influence on our society, and our economy in the time of the Gilded Age.
The first of his excursions with the economy was in 1895, when president Cleveland called on Morgan to help with a terrible economic drop. This drop was caused by massive railroad speculation and a massive increase in investment in railroads that not only went nowhere, but somehow connected nowheres to nowheres. He called upon Europe to help with the economic crash, creating a deal with which to get enough money to finance the economy and bring it out of its terrible crash. The way he did it was by directing congress to sell bonds and to stop the drainage of money by Congress, as well as buy back gold from international syndicates.There is speculation that J.P. Morgan managed to gain quite a bit from this deal, pocketing a certain amount of money for himself with every sum of money financing the US, and yet the unarguable fact is that singlehandedly, Morgan was able to bring us out of an economic depression that could have easily upset our country for years to come.
The second time that Morgan had a hand in keeping our economy from taking a nosedive was when Theodore Roosevelt came to him for help. Morgan, ever the dramatist, organized several powerful bankers in a library and situated them so that they could not leave until they provided proper funding. This funding was to go to a rescue fund of the United States Treasury, and would be the way for congress to save the economy. Yet again, Morgan was able to keep America's economy going, something no mad had singlehandedly done before.
The longterm effects of Morgan's power on the economy are disputable to this day, but there is no arguing the fact that he may very well be the reason our "gilded age" was able to carry us as far as Britain during their industrial revolution in half the time. His talent for business and money were clear as day, and his ability to keep our economy alive and well may be the sole reason we have such a prosperous consumer society today. Whether or not that it is a good thing is up to historians and politicians to debate, but we know for a fact that Morgan was an incredibly influential man who saved the US economy not once, but two times.
Your post is very well written and organized nicely. There was some interesting conspiracies flying around at the time, and this helped to confirm it in their minds. The Rothschilds House helped in this bailout and this confirmed, to the farmers and populists, that the Jews were using the banks against them by holding to the gold standard. At the same time, there was an increased number of Jews entering the United States as a result of religious discrimination in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Many of them settled in New York City, home of the banks and big business. This only furthered the anti-Semitism of the Populists which helped promote the Jewish economic control conspiracy.
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http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/judaism.htm
I would have to agree with Connor this post is very well written and flows through very well. At no point did I feel like something was unclear or choppily written. I can tell that this was well researched before being written. Although Morgan did successfully bring the United States out of a near economic disaster twice he also helped to change the playing field forever. Many people felt that no man should have so much power that he can single handedly bring a country out of an economic collapse. After Morgan there were laws put in place to ensure that no man or women could ever gain this much power again.
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