The great man could spare exactly two minutes. Like a huge, baleful dragon he sat, not posing but confronting the camera, defying it to do its worst, gripping the polished arm I of the chair so that it looked like a gleaming pigsticker aimed at the vitals. The photographer, Edward Stcichcn, had time for two exposures; then his visitor rose, clapped a square-topped derby on his head, reached for the big black cigar he had laid aside, and departed.

Afterward Steichen described the impact of that formidable personality: meeting the man’s eyes was something like confronting the headlights of an onrushing express train—if you could get out of the way it was only an awe-inspiring experience; otherwise it was calamitous. That was the effect John Pierpont Morgan nearly always had on people. What they saw first was the bulbous, flaming nose that was his affliction and his shame; to avoid staring at it they looked him in the eye and were struck dumb. Lincoln Steffens, who as a young financial reporter had interviewed him, recalled how “his eyes glared, his great red nose seemed to me to flash and darken, flash and darken.” That was back in the nineties, a decade before Steichen’s great photograph was made, when Morgan was at his office at 23 Wall Street every day. He sat alone, Steffens wrote, in a back room with glass sides; fhe door was open, as if anyone might walk in and ask a question. But no one dared; not even his partners went near him unless they were summoned, “and then they looked alarmed and darted in like officeboys.”

Everything about Morgan bespoke solidity and permanence—his inevitable wing collar, Ascot tie, severe dark suit; the enormous bloodstone that hung from a heavy gold watch chain, the very stone and chain he had worn when he entered the business world in 1857. Everything he did was on a magnificent scale—his yacht, the Corsair , was the biggest, the collies he bred won the best blue ribbons, the works of art he brought back from Europe staggered the imagination. Truly, he was a man above men. As Mr. Dooley put it in an impersonation of Morgan, “call up the Czar an’ th’ Pope an’ th’ Sultan an’ th’ Impror Willuni, an’ tell thim we won’t need their sarvices afther nex’ week.”

J. P. Morgan was easily the most powerful personal force in American life. In the depression of 1895 he had rescued the United States government (at a price) when it ran short of gold; in 1901 he had put together U.S. Steel, the world’s first “billion-dollar” corporation; six years later only his enormous courage, audacity, and prestige saved the country from financial disaster. When he went abroad in 1901 the King of England asked that Morgan be seated at his right at a banquet; in Germany he dined alone with the Kaiser (when Wilhelm II