Almost everyone remembers the picture of a midget sitting on J. P. Morgan’s knee, but few recall, or ever knew, the end of that story. It is nearly unbearably sad. The thing happened in the Senate Caucus Room on the morning of June I, 1933, while Morgan, surrounded by a cortege of partners and lawyers and assistants, was sitting in a leather-upholstered chair waiting to testify before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. Reporters, photographers, and spectators were milling around. Suddenly, in the confusion, too quickly for official intervention, a press agent for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, apparently with the connivance of a Scripps-Howard reporter named Ray Tucker, popped the midget, a member of the circus troupe, into Morgan’s lap. Instantly the photographers were climbing onto chairs and pushing people aside to get into position for pictures.

Morgan at the time was a dignified, avuncular-looking man in his middle sixties. The circus lady, whose name was Lya Graf and who was twenty-seven inches tall, was a plump, well-proportioned brunette with sparkling dark eyes and a fresh peasant prettiness, and she was decked out in a flounced blue satin dress and a red straw hat of fishnet weave. Morgan’s cortege stiffened as if frozen; but Morgan himself did not. His face, previously set into hard lines by a week of hostile questioning by the committee, relaxed, became disturbed, then turned kindly, and a small, warm smile crossed it under the bushy black eyebrows and the neat white mustache.

“I have a grandson bigger than you,” he said.

“But I’m older,” Miss Graf replied.

“How old are you?”

The press agent said she was thirty-two, but Miss Graf corrected him:

“I am not—only twenty.”

“Well, you certainly don’t look it,” Morgan said.

The photographers clamored for one more shot, and the press agent told Miss Graf to take off her hat. “Don’t take it off, it’s pretty,” Morgan said; then he lifted her from his lap and set her carefully on the floor. The partners, who had been looking on in rigid dismay, exhaled and collapsed in their chairs; one of them brusquely shooed the press agent and Miss Graf away; and Morgan went on smiling, more feebly now. Next day the picture was famous everywhere in the world where newspapers are published.

Morgan, and even Wall Street as a whole, profited adventitiously from the encounter. From that day forward until his death a decade later, he was in the public mind no longer a grasping devil whose greed and ruthlessness had helped bring the nation to near ruin, but rather a benign old dodderer. The change in attitude was instantaneous, and Morgan took advantage of it, seizing, whether by calculation or instinct, on further chances to “humanize” himself. The following day, asked to comment on the incident by reporters possessed of a new interest