J. P. Morgan

• 1. A Gale Through the House

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  A visit from J. P. Morgan, one man said, left him feeling "as if a gale had blown through the house." The American financier had that effect on people. He was physically large, with massive shoulders and piercing eyes. His nose was swollen and purple, deformed by rhinophyma, a disease that can grow out of rosacea. Surgeons of his day could have shaved the growth away. His son-in-law Herbert L. Satterlee speculated that Morgan avoided surgery because he feared the seizures of his childhood might return. Morgan hated being photographed without his permission, and every professional portrait of him was retouched. Even so, he seemed to dare people to meet his gaze squarely.

  This documentary follows John Pierpont Morgan, the banker who dominated Wall Street through the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. How did a merchant banker's son from Connecticut come to hold such power? What did he build, whom did he outmaneuver, and who demanded that he answer for it?

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• 2. Education of a Banker

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  Pierpont, not John, was the name Morgan wanted to hear. He was born on the 17th of April 1837 in Hartford, Connecticut, to Junius Spencer Morgan and Juliet Pierpont. Junius was a partner at Howe Mather & Co., the largest dry goods wholesaler in Hartford. Juliet was the daughter of the poet John Pierpont, and her brother James Lord Pierpont composed the Christmas song Jingle Bells.

  In 1847, when the boy was ten, his grandfather Joseph Morgan died and left the family a large fortune. Joseph had been one of the co-founders of Aetna. Junius soon became senior partner in a firm renamed Mather Morgan & Co., while Pierpont studied at West Middle School and Cheshire Academy.

  In September 1851 Pierpont passed the entrance exam for The English High School of Boston, which specialized in mathematics for careers in commerce. In April 1852 rheumatic fever struck him. Its symptoms grew worse as he aged and eventually left him in such pain that he could not walk. Junius sent him to the Azores, where he convalesced for almost a year before returning to Boston to resume his studies.

  In 1856 his father sent him to Bellerive, a school in the Swiss village of La Tour-de-Peilz, where he became fluent in French. Next came the University of Göttingen, where he worked on his German. He reached passable fluency and took a degree in art history within six months, finishing in 1857.

  London in August 1857 was his next stop, because his father was a partner there in the merchant banking firm George Peabody & Co. Over the following fourteen years Morgan served as his father's American representative in a series of affiliated New York banking houses. The first was Duncan, Sherman & Company, where he started as a junior clerk in 1858.

  The Panic of 1857, a rash of business failures, had just shaken investor confidence in American securities. Peabody & Co. did most of its business in the United States, so it was threatened when several American correspondent banks had to suspend operations. Creditors including Baring Brothers demanded payment. George Peabody defied them, daring his rivals to put him out of business, and in November 1857 he borrowed from the Bank of England. The loan saved the house, though Morgan was surprised that the famed Barings house was not more accommodating.

  Duncan Sherman came under criticism on Wall Street, and the Mercantile Agency recommended that it be dissolved. Morgan urged his father to stand by the firm, complaining of "outrageous" reports "of Browns & Barings getting the credit for what they never did".

  His father kept watch by letter. "Remember," J.S. Morgan wrote his son, "that there is an Eye above that is ever upon you and that for every act, word, and deed you will one day be called to give account." Junius trusted his son's austere religious discipline, and Pierpont enjoyed wide independence in both his investments and his lifestyle. His father's reputation and his place as the obvious successor to the Peabody house made him one of the most sought-after young men on Wall Street. Friends of his father praised his work ethic.

  His desk work was practical. He collected and forwarded interest and dividend payments, executed orders on the New York Stock Exchange, and checked the credit of mercantile houses that dealt with Peabody & Co. He also learned railroad finance and reorganization, personally negotiating loans for the Ohio & Mississippi and Illinois Central lines.

  In early January 1859 Morgan set out for several months in the South. He visited the firm's correspondents in Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana to learn the cotton trade, spending most of his time in New Orleans, a leading cotton export hub. A short stop in Cuba gave him a lifelong taste for Cuban cigars. In later years he smoked dozens a day, favoring large Havana cigars that observers nicknamed Hercules' Clubs.

  In New Orleans he also made an unauthorized coffee trade at a profit. He counted it his first fully independent transaction, and Duncan Sherman answered with a stern warning. That summer he visited his father in London, and the two discussed whether he should start his own firm. He also courted Amelia Sturges. When the American Civil War began, it delayed those plans.

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• 3. War Years and Carbines

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  A one-room office at 53 Exchange Place housed J. Pierpont Morgan & Company when it opened, sometime between April and July 1861. The war had slowed business and delayed the opening. As Morgan expected, most of his work came from his father and resembled what he had handled at Duncan Sherman. He kept out of uniform by paying a substitute $300 to take his place.

  In October 1861 he married Amelia "Memi" Sturges at her home on 5 East Fourteenth Street. She was already seriously ill with tuberculosis, and he carried her to the drawing room for a small private ceremony. Afterward he carried her to the carriage that took them to the pier. They sailed for Algiers, where he hoped the warm climate would restore their health. It did not. She died in Nice in February 1862, four months and ten days after the wedding.

  The war reshaped his business. It virtually eliminated his cotton trade and sharply cut iron imports for American railroads, pushing him toward securities and foreign exchange. Once the Battle of Antietam turned the war in the Union's favor, the Morgans made a large profit buying and selling Union bonds. They also expanded trade in European securities, backed by a large deposit from W. W. Corcoran, who had liquidated his American holdings out of sympathy for the Confederate cause.

  Gold offered another opening after specie payments were suspended in 1862, because its price tracked the odds of a Union victory. In October 1863 Morgan and Edward B. Ketchum shipped $1.15 million in gold to England. The transfer forced a price spike, and both men sold their holdings at a large profit. Critics have long seen an attempt to corner the American gold market and proof of Morgan's insensitivity to the nation's finances, though the economic consequences turned out minor.

  In 1862 Morgan made his cousin James Goodwin a partner. The firm got a serious boost when his father succeeded George Peabody as head of the London office and moved the remaining commercial credit and securities accounts over from Duncan Sherman. By the end of 1862 it ranked among the stronger private banking houses on Wall Street.

  The Hall Carbine Affair began in August 1861, when Morgan lent $20,000 to Simon Stevens, a well-connected New York attorney and former secretary to Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens used the money to buy five thousand carbine rifles to sell to General John C. Frémont, commander of the Department of the West. The weapons were designed by John H. Hall and made by Simeon North. The government had sold them in June 1861 to the arms dealer Arthur M. Eastman for $3.50 apiece.

  After the Union defeat at Bull Run raised the value of arms, Stevens bought the rifles from Eastman at $11.50 each. He immediately resold them to Frémont, a longtime acquaintance, at $22 each. During the loan's thirty-eight days, Morgan held title to the carbines and took responsibility for replacing their barrels with rifled ones before shipment. When Stevens asked for a second loan, Morgan refused and requested repayment of the first. On the 14th of September he received $55,000 from the Army, deducted the loan, expenses and interest, and passed the rest to Stevens.

  By then the deal was already controversial. Military officials thought Frémont had overpaid, and a report in 1863 by the United States House Select Committee on Government Contracts condemned the profiteers as "worse than traitors in arms". Morgan was neither criticized nor censured in the contemporary investigations. Even so, his name stayed attached to the affair for years.

  In 1910 Gustavus Myers revived interest with his book History of the Great American Fortunes. He claimed the rifles were more likely to blow off the shooter's thumb than to harm the enemy, and an earlier model of the carbine was known to have that flaw. R. Gordon Wasson, later head of public relations for J.P. Morgan & Co., argued there was no evidence that Morgan knew of any scheme to profit. Vincent Carosso, who wrote an academic history of the Morgan house, agreed that Stevens "used Morgan's name". Carosso wrote that "none of the evidence suggested that Morgan himself had been a party to the shabby contract or had participated in its profits," though Morgan "failed to exercise the care and caution that he had demonstrated two years earlier in the New Orleans coffee deal".

  Matthew Josephson, who popularized the term "robber baron", asserted that Morgan certainly knew. His evidence was that Morgan presented the government with a bill for $58,175 before delivering the remaining rifles held as collateral. Charles Morris reviewed the evidence and also called it "implausible" that Morgan did not know the source of his profits.

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• 4. Morganization

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  On the 1st of October 1864, George Peabody retired completely from the firm, now renamed J. S. Morgan & Co., and agreed to reinvest his share. To expand internationally, Junius Morgan hired Charles H. Dabney as senior partner on the 15th of November. Dabney, fifty-seven and a partner at Duncan Sherman, was widely respected for his accounting skill and integrity. In the new arrangement J. P. Morgan took primary responsibility for recruiting business.

  Through the 1870s the firm stayed focused on merchant banking and commodities. It traded iron rails, American cotton, Philippine tobacco, Brazilian coffee and Peruvian guano. In 1865, on the advice of Levi P. Morton, Morgan won an exclusive four-year contract with the Peruvian government to export guano, used for fertilizer and gunpowder, at a two-and-a-half percent commission. Between 1863 and 1873, profits from securities exceeded trade commissions only once, in 1865.

  Railroad stock and government bonds dominated what securities trading the firm did. Railroad construction had halted during the war and did not recover until after 1867, when Jay Cooke & Company of Philadelphia dominated American government financing. In 1866 the firm earned a "considerable sum" selling shares of the Atlantic Telegraph Company once the trans-Atlantic wire was laid. Even so, its creditor Brown Shipley declined to extend Morgan's line of credit, calling the company no better than a speculative trader in securities.

  Anthony Joseph Drexel, a Philadelphia financier, became Morgan's mentor in 1871 at the urging of J.S. Morgan. Together they formed Drexel Morgan & Co., a New York merchant banking partnership that acted as agent for European investment in the United States. It took the leading role in financing American railroads and stabilizing securities markets. It also created a national capital market for industrial companies, which had existed only for railroads and canals before. In 1877 it underwrote the pay of the entire U.S. Army to restore investor confidence.

  Railroads, America's largest enterprises, became the foundation of Morgan's power. He led the syndicate that broke the government-financing privileges of Jay Cooke. He raised large sums in Europe, especially through the American rails section of the London Stock Exchange. He did not stop at raising money. He managed and reorganized the lines himself, raising their efficiency in a practice that made him an early pioneer of private equity and came to be called "Morganization".

  In 1883 he marketed a large part of William H. Vanderbilt's New York Central holdings. Two years later he reorganized the New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railroad and leased it to the New York Central. Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, and Morgan responded by convening industry conferences in 1889 and 1890. He brought railroad presidents together to follow the new law and to write agreements for "public, reasonable, uniform and stable rates".

  Nothing like it had been tried before. The conferences created a community of interest among competing lines and paved the way for the consolidations of the early twentieth century. Before he was done, Morgan and his partners held controlling interests in 21 railroads, along with Aetna, Western Union and the Pullman Car Company.

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• 5. Presidents and Inventors

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  The death of Anthony Drexel in 1895 turned the firm into J. P. Morgan & Company. It kept close ties with Drexel & Company of Philadelphia, Morgan, Harjes & Company of Paris, and J.S. Morgan & Company of London, which became Morgan, Grenfell & Company after 1910. By 1900 it ranked among the world's most powerful banking houses, specializing in reorganizations and consolidations. Morgan had many partners, among them George Walbridge Perkins, but he always stayed firmly in charge.

  Around 1895, deep in the Panic of 1893, the U.S. Treasury nearly ran out of gold. Morgan proposed that the federal government buy gold from his bank and from European banks. Officials declined in favor of selling government bonds directly to the public. Morgan demanded a meeting with President Grover Cleveland and told him the government could default that very day unless it acted.

  His solution used an old Civil War statute. It allowed Morgan and the Rothschilds to sell 3.5 million ounces of gold directly to the Treasury in exchange for a 30-year bond issue. The deal saved the Treasury but damaged Cleveland with the populist agrarian wing of the Democratic Party, and his political career was over. In the presidential election of 1896, William Jennings Bryan launched a withering attack on bankers, and Morgan was among many who donated heavily to the Republican William McKinley.

  In 1900 the inventor Nikola Tesla persuaded Morgan to back a trans-Atlantic wireless communication system, eventually sited at Wardenclyffe. Tesla's design rested on his theories of Earth and atmospheric electrical conduction. He argued it would outperform the short-range radio-wave wireless telegraph that Guglielmo Marconi was demonstrating. Morgan gave Tesla $150,000, in what may have been a philanthropic investment, and Tesla offered him 51% control of the patents.

  Almost as soon as the letter of agreement was signed, Tesla decided to enlarge the plan to include terrestrial wireless power transmission. Morgan refused to give him any further money. Tesla could not find other investors, Wardenclyffe stalled, and the site was abandoned by 1906.

  The Northern Pacific Railway went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893. That wiped out its bondholders and left it free of debt, and a complex battle for control followed. In 1901 Morgan, the New York financier E. H. Harriman and the Minnesota railroad builder James J. Hill reached a compromise. To reduce competition in the Midwest, they created the Northern Securities Company to merge the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy.

  Theodore Roosevelt stood in the way. The president considered the merger bad for consumers and a violation of the seldom enforced Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In 1902 he ordered Attorney General Philander Knox to sue. In 1904 the Supreme Court dissolved the company. Morgan lost no money, but his reputation for all-powerful political reach suffered. Within a few years he would need that same president's help.

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• 6. Steel and Ships

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  In 1900 Morgan began talks to buy Andrew Carnegie's steel business and merge it with other steel, coal, mining and shipping firms. First he financed the creation of the Federal Steel Company. In 1901 he merged it with Carnegie Steel and several other steel and iron businesses, including William Edenbirn's Consolidated Steel and Wire Company. The result was the United States Steel Corporation, the world's first billion-dollar company. Its authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion dwarfed any other industrial firm and rivaled the largest railroads.

  Charles M. Schwab, the company's president, and others argued that its size would help it compete globally against the United Kingdom and Germany. The stated goals included economies of scale, lower transportation and resource costs, wider product lines and better distribution. Critics saw a monopoly that aimed to dominate steel and also bridges, ships, railroad cars, rails, wire, nails and many other products. With U.S. Steel, Morgan captured two-thirds of the steel market, and Schwab was confident the company would soon hold 75%.

  U.S. Steel's labor policy drew its own criticism. The company was non-union and used aggressive tactics to find and root out pro-union "troublemakers". The lawyers and bankers who organized the merger, Morgan among them, cared more about long-range profits, stability and good public relations. Their views generally won out, producing a "paternalistic" labor policy.

  A rare defeat came in 1902, in London. Morgan tried to build and operate a line on the London Underground, the Piccadilly, City and North East London Railway. Transit magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes blocked him from obtaining parliamentary authority, because the line would have competed with the "tube" lines Yerkes controlled. Morgan called the coup "the greatest rascality and conspiracy I ever heard of".

  That same year J.P. Morgan & Co. financed the International Mercantile Marine Co., an Atlantic shipping company that absorbed several major American and British lines. Morgan hoped to dominate transatlantic shipping through interlocking directorates and contractual arrangements with the railroads. It proved impossible. Sea transport ran on no fixed schedule, American antitrust legislation stood in the way, and an agreement with the British government added a third obstacle.

  Morgan booked a luxury suite with a private promenade deck on the Titanic and planned to sail on its ill-fated maiden voyage. The ship belonged to White Star Line, a subsidiary of the shipping company. His plans later changed. The sinking was a financial disaster for the parent company, whose records show it carried too much debt and too little cash flow. It defaulted on bond interest. Morgan purportedly said of the sinking: "Monetary losses amount to nothing in life. It is the loss of life that counts. It is that frightful death."

  Steel and shipping were two entries on a much longer list. Between 1890 and 1913, J.P. Morgan and Company organized or underwrote, in whole or in part, 42 major corporations. The roster includes General Electric, International Harvester, American Telephone & Telegraph, DuPont and General Motors.

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• 7. Panic and Reckoning

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  Treasury Secretary George B. Cortelyou earmarked $35 million of federal money for deposit in New York banks as the Panic of 1907 threatened to cripple the American economy. Major banks stood near bankruptcy, and no mechanism existed to rescue them. Morgan stepped in. He gathered the nation's leading financiers at his New York mansion and forced them to devise a plan. James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, also played a central role.

  Morgan organized a team of bank and trust executives. They redirected money between banks, secured further international lines of credit, and bought up the falling stocks of healthy corporations. A delicate problem arose with the brokerage firm Moore and Schley, which was deeply invested in the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. The firm had pledged over $6 million of that company's stock as collateral for loans from Wall Street banks and could not repay them. Its failure could have set off a larger crisis.

  Morgan proposed that U.S. Steel, one of the railroad company's chief competitors, absorb it. U.S. Steel president Elbert Gary agreed but worried that antitrust issues could block the merger. Morgan sent him to see President Theodore Roosevelt, who promised legal immunity for the deal. U.S. Steel paid $30 million for the stock, and Moore and Schley was saved. The announcement had an immediate effect, and by the 7th of November 1907 the panic was over.

  Conservatives hailed Morgan for civic responsibility, for strengthening the national economy and for devotion to the arts and religion. Critics of banking and consolidation saw him as a leading figure in the system they rejected. They attacked the terms of his 1895 gold loan to the Treasury. Many, including the writer Upton Sinclair, attacked his handling of the Panic of 1907.

  In December 1912 Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency committee. It concluded that a small number of financial leaders held considerable control over many industries. The partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. and the directors of First National and National City Bank controlled aggregate resources of $22.245 billion. Louis Brandeis compared that sum to the value of all the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi River.

  A newspaper account dated the 31st of March 1913 described Morgan's illness as "a long sinking spell". It was marked by extreme weakness and nervousness. He had realized he could not take in food because of a paralysis of the muscles in his throat, and trying to speak made his throat contract. No other organic trouble was present. As he worsened he drifted in and out of consciousness and was fed by "injection". Morgan had been traveling abroad, and he died in his sleep that day at the Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, at the age of 75.

  A French Line passenger ship carried his body back to America. Flags on Wall Street flew at half-staff, and in an honor usually reserved for heads of state, the stock market closed for two hours as the body passed through New York City. It lay the first night at his home and its adjoining library. He was buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, his birthplace. His son John Pierpont "Jack" Morgan Jr. inherited the banking business.

  His estate was worth $68.3 million, and about $30 million of that was his share in the New York and Philadelphia banks. His art collection was valued at an estimated $50 million. The biographer Ron Chernow put his total fortune at $80 million.

  In the early 2000s, an investigation by the historian James Lide uncovered a darker chapter in the banks that later became part of JPMorgan Chase. Two of them, Citizens' Bank and Canal Bank, served plantations from the 1830s until the Civil War. When plantation owners defaulted on loans, the banks sometimes took ownership of enslaved people who had been pledged as collateral. JPMorgan estimated that between 1831 and 1865 the two banks accepted about 13,000 enslaved people as collateral and ended up owning about 1,250. The company made an apology, in compliance with a rule requiring companies to detail past dealings with the slave trade when doing business with the city of Chicago.

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• 8. Collector and Legacy

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  The house at 219 Madison Avenue, built in 1853 by John Jay Phelps, became the first electrically lit private residence in America on the 6th of June 1882. Morgan had bought it that year. A coal-fueled steam engine drove two generators to supply the power. His interest in the technology came from financing Thomas Alva Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1878.

  On the 31st of May 1865 Morgan married Frances Louisa "Fanny" Tracy, whom he met at St. George's Church. They had four children: Louisa, J. P. Morgan Jr., Juliet and Anne Tracy Morgan, who became a philanthropist. When Juliet married William Pierson Hamilton on the 12th of April 1894, the Madison Avenue house hosted a reception for 1,000 people. The couple received a favorite clock of Morgan's.

  Morgan spent three months of every year in London and kept two houses there. His town house at 13 Prince's Gate came from his father and grew when he bought the neighboring Number 14 to hold his expanding art collection. He also owned the Cragston estate in Highland Falls, New York.

  A blackballing pushed Morgan into founding a club. When his friend John King, president of the Erie Railroad, was rejected by the Union Club of New York, Morgan resigned and organized the Metropolitan Club. He donated the land at 5th Avenue and 60th Street, at a cost of $125,000, and told Stanford White to "build me a club fit for gentlemen, forget the expense". He invited King in as a charter member and served as club president from 1891 to 1900.

  At the New York Yacht Club, where Morgan was Commodore, a board meeting on the 27th of October 1898 discussed a new clubhouse. Morgan offered to acquire a 75 by 100 foot plot on 44th Street if the club raised its annual dues from $25 to $50 and used the whole site. The board accepted, and Morgan bought the lots the next day for $148,000 and donated them. Members gave him a trophy at a housewarming party on the 29th of January 1901.

  The first of his large yachts was the Corsair, built by William Cramp & Sons and launched on the 26th of May 1880 for Charles J. Osborn, private banker to Jay Gould. Morgan bought it in 1882. The line "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" is commonly attributed to him, in reply to a question about what a yacht costs to maintain. The story is unconfirmed.

  Morgan was a lifelong Episcopalian and by 1890 one of the church's most influential leaders. He was a founding member of the Church Club of New York. As one of the first laymen on the committee that produced the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, he petitioned for a special limited collectible printing, which he later financed. In 1910 he gave $100,000 to support a commission, proposed by Bishop Charles Brent, to organize a world conference of churches on their differences in "faith and order".

  Morgan became a major collector after his father's death in 1891, and people called him a "collector of collections". He gathered books, manuscripts, decorative arts, bronze statuettes, ivories and clocks, with less interest in paintings than most collectors. He was a founding member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a trustee from 1888 to 1913. In 1904 he became its president and steered it toward important original works. The British artist and art critic Roger Fry served the museum as curator and later as purchasing agent, but he clashed with Morgan and lost his position.

  After a favorable tariff bill passed, his collection was shipped from London, mostly from 14 Princes Gate, to the United States. His paintings were shown at the Metropolitan in 1913, and in 1914 the whole collection filled the second floor of a new wing. In 1917 Jack donated about 40% of it, thousands of objects, to the Metropolitan, though he sold many of the most valuable works. He also donated the London house at 14 Princes Gate to the U.S. Government to serve as an embassy.

  Most of the rare books and manuscripts, with some paintings and art objects, are in the Morgan Library & Museum on 36th Street, near Madison Avenue. In 1924 Jack made the Pierpont Morgan Library a public institution, as a memorial to his father. He appointed Belle da Costa Greene, his father's private librarian, as its first director.

  By 1900 Morgan owned the most important gem collection in the United States. Tiffany & Co. assembled the first, more than 1,000 American gemstones, under its chief gemologist George Frederick Kunz. Shown at the World's Fair in Paris in 1889, it won two golden awards. Kunz built a second, finer collection, exhibited in Paris in 1900. Both went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where they were known as the Morgan-Tiffany and Morgan-Bement collections.

  In 1906 Morgan offered the photographer Edward S. Curtis $75,000 to create a series on the American Indians. Curtis eventually published a 20-volume work, The North American Indian. He also made a motion picture, In the Land of the Head Hunters, in 1914. It was restored in 1974 and re-released as In the Land of the War Canoes.

  Jack never matched his father's influence. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 forced the House of Morgan to split into three entities. J.P. Morgan & Co. later became Morgan Guaranty Trust and merged with Chase Bank. Morgan Stanley was an investment house formed by his grandson Henry Sturgis Morgan. Morgan Grenfell was an overseas securities house in London. The gemstone morganite was named in his honor, and the Cragston Dependencies at his estate were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Adrian Wooldridge called him America's "greatest banker".

  John Dos Passos used a contemporary literary biography of Morgan as an allegory for postwar American finance in Nineteen Nineteen, the second volume of his U.S.A. trilogy. Morgan appears as a character in Caleb Carr's novel The Alienist, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime and Graham Moore's The Last Days of Night. He is believed to be the model for Walter Parks Thatcher, played by George Coulouris, the guardian in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane. Chris Noth portrayed him in the 2012 series Titanic: Blood and Steel.

  According to Phil Orbanes, a former vice president of Parker Brothers, Rich Uncle Pennybags of the American version of Monopoly is modeled on Morgan. The family of the illustrator Daniel Fox, who created the mascot in 1936, credits Morgan as the inspiration.

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