Morgan bankers are no strangers within the study of United States history. Scholars have noted Morgan’s important role in organizing cooperative syndicate arrangements, and they have assessed Morgan creation of value in various industrial sectors. Recent work has stressed the utility of Morgan partners’ social ties within the larger U.S. financial network. Within foreign relations scholarship, the Morgans have largely featured in questions of dollar diplomacy and in interwar reparations.
This paper brings together scholarship from business history, U.S. foreign relations history, and communication studies. Less interested in proving that the Morgans colluded with the U.S. government for mutual interests or in showing the structural consequences of their financial arrangements, this paper is more interested in how the Morgans interacted with civil society to promote collaborative domestic and global arrangements that they preferred.
Collaborative efforts, as Morgan understood, did not happen organically. Fellow bankers, business leaders, and the general public had to be convinced of the merits of cooperation during the early twentieth century. The war years eased obstacles to collective efforts. During these years, the Morgans intensified their own public footprint in the name of encouraging cooperation over competition both within U.S. industries and among the Allied Powers in coordinating purchasing orders. Finally, between 1918-1920 the Morgans engaged in the crucial cultural project of circulating ideas about the importance of the League of Nations as a space for Great Power cooperation. Morgan public narratives during this time not only reveal their expanded cooperative ethos, but demonstrate that these bankers understood that their program required changing minds as well as laws.