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William J. Novak's engaging historiography is at once a recovery project and a prolegomenon to a revised history of political economy. His article chronicles the achievements of Progressive Era institutional economists and critiques the way they have been obscured by the shadow of the Chicago School of economics. Why do the Progressives deserve to be recovered and remembered? According to Novak, it is because they “underwrote one of the more fundamental governmental revolutions in modern times” and created the foundations for the “social control of business” (pp. 676, 672).

Focusing on the private investment bank of J. P. Morgan & Co., this article examines the unique perspective that the history of private investment banking offers the study of reputation with regard to the role of social ties. Drawing from a larger study that looks at intersecting social and economic networks of New York private bankers before the Second World War, the article studies the ways in which the Morgan partners' social networks worked to maintain their reputation by creating an institutional structure for firm cohesion, establishing access to information and resources outside the firm, and fostering a culture of exclusivity that signaled the firm's standing and its ties relative to their competitors or other elite bankers.

Gentlemen Bankers focuses on the social and economic circles of one of America's most renowned and influential financiers, J. P. Morgan, to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century.

Gentlemen Bankers focuses on the social and economic circles of one of America's most renowned and influential financiers, J. P. Morgan, to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century.

Gentlemen Bankers focuses on the social and economic circles of one of America's most renowned and influential financiers, J. P. Morgan, to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century.

THE FIRST DECADE after the First World War was a period of enormous growth for the Morgan bank, both in terms of the size and the scope of its organization. Between 1920 and 1929 the House of Morgan’s American branches admitted more partners (fourteen) than they had during any ten-year period in the twentieth century before the Second World War. Three were admitted in 1920 alone, including Jack Morgan’s son, Junius Spencer Morgan Jr., who represented the first of the third generation of the Morgan family in the firm.¹ In 1929, Junius was joined by his brother, Henry Sturgis Morgan,

THOUGH SUBTLE CHANGES in the makeup and organization of the Morgan bank began before the First World War, they did not emerge as significant until after Pierpont Morgan’s death. Like his father, Jack Morgan was a private man with a strong sense of responsibility and patrician values. He was raised in the same merchant banking traditions and his death in 1943, above all, signified the passing of that generation.¹ But during the interwar period, the Morgan firm began to move toward a more managerial model, which had much to do with Morgan’s character, personality, and style. The change in the

IN FEBRUARY 1940, Jack Morgan announced that J. P. Morgan & Co. was leaving the private unlimited liability partnership structure to become a limited liability corporation. Though Morgan told his friends that the decision was made in order to safeguard the bank’s capital from taxes and the death of senior partners, this was only part of the story.¹ Without denying that economic considerations were important, J. P. Morgan & Co.’s formal break with its nineteenth-century merchant banking roots was of enormous practical and symbolic significance. While the bank had abandoned investment banking in 1935 in direct response to federal legislation,

AS HIS ROLE in the Harvard segregation case demonstrated, Thomas Lamont was adept at dealing with unpleasant contradictions. In the 1920s, during the same time as the Harvard case, his skills were also put to the test on the international stage as the Morgan firm became more deeply involved in American foreign policy interests in the aftermath of the First World War. Lamont was not only exceptionally well suited for the postwar world, he embraced his role as the bank’s most public face. More than a journalist or a banker, Lamont was truly a “diplomat” at heart. When he died