I was headed home on the uptown train from work when someone slid a note down the thick ring-bound binder I had taken to carrying around for this review. My head popped up to meet the blue eyes of a girl about my age who seemed interested in the large manuscript spread across my lap.
"What's the book?" her note read in a flowing cursive. "A biography," I scribbled in return. Back again: "Who of?" "A banker," I wrote, my hand shaking.
She got off at the next stop without glancing back.
That is a way of saying that Edward M. Lamont's more than 500-page biography of his grandfather "The Ambassador from Wall Street," subtitled "The Story of Thomas W. Lamont, JPMorgan's Chief Executive" was not made to win the heart of the average 20-something-year-old.
The story it tells is a slow march through the life of a banker who was involved in some of the 20th century's most defining political negotiations — in both World Wars, the Great Depression and through the rise of socialism and fascism abroad.
Written by Lamont's grandson and initially published in 1993, it is now being republished in paperback with a new foreword from Thomas W. Lamont's great-grandson — Ned Lamont, Governor of Connecticut. It's a weighty summary of the life of a banker who "knew everyone worth knowing" and seemed to be everywhere worth being. The story includes insights into the U.S.'s guiding economic and political influence through the 20th century. Other more analytical, impartial and readable texts, however, have been written since the book was first published some 30 years ago. Its Bible-like stature considered, this one may have been better left on the bookshelf.
Thomas W. Lamont, a Claverack, New York, native affectionately called TWL in the book, attended the elite New Hampshire prep school Phillips Exeter Academy before being shipped off to Harvard. That propelled him on a cushioned ride to society's upper echelons, shared by the sons of presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
But the son of a modest Methodist preacher and mother who "never ate the bread of idleness," the elder Lamont's journey to partner at JPMorgan by age 40 and CEO within the next decade is less clear-cut than it seems. He went from writing freelance articles to subsidize his college tuition to working as an editor at the New York Tribune before he decided a reporter's salary wouldn't do for a married man.
At that point, TWL received an offer to work for an importing and marketing firm, setting him off on his finance career that would amass him a fortune. He became well known for commuting by yacht from his Englewood, New Jersey, home to Wall Street after becoming CEO of JPMorgan by the 1920s. He was elected as the company's chairman in 1943.
TWL gave counsel to Presidents Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He traveled regularly to Europe, South America and East Asia to untangle fiscal knots and consult with world leaders, notably doling out loans that would help stabilize the French franc and Italian lira in the mid-1920s and lift Japan from the painful aftermath of a major earthquake in 1923.
To place TWL's influence in context, take his role in the First World War. After trouble struck Allied leaders in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on the banker to serve abroad as an unofficial U.S. financial emissary. Lamont spearheaded Allied war bond drives (and would again in the Second World War). When it came time to negotiate how much Germany owed the war-torn Allied countries in reparations, TWL was at the Treaty of Versailles, arguing for a more reasonable sum.
Wall Street's ambassador abroad was likewise instrumental in events related more directly to U.S. financial services. He was a representative of the banking industry in debates over the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, the gold standard and the legacy of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. He also warned of the dangers that an excess of poorly capitalized small banks posed to the economy.
TWL's judgment, however, was not always sound — and the text's depiction of him sometimes feels incomplete. That the banker failed to take a firm stance against Japan's militaristic rise until it was too late is noted. But unlike in Ron Chernow's more critical work "House of Morgan," which dives into the history of the Morgan family and the bank that still bears that name, there is little on Lamont's role in the Mukden Incident, the false flag that Japan orchestrated to justify its invasion of Manchuria.
Unfortunately, "The Ambassador" fails to either serve as entertainment — long descriptive chapters suffocate the most life-giving moments — or as an important nonfiction text — it lacks the footnotes and objectivity a textbook would require.
After slogging through the tome, I emailed a handful of business and banking history professors to get their take on the book's instructiveness. Perhaps tellingly, only one responded, Martin Horn, associate dean and history professor at McMaster University, who described the book as helpful for scholars who could not access the Lamont papers at Harvard's Baker Library.
"Overall, I would characterize 'The Ambassador' as a useful work, albeit not one that has influenced materially the historiography in the various fields in which discussion of Thomas W. Lamont is relevant," said Horn, who instead recommended Chernow's work.
All the same, I finished this book smarter for my struggle and reminded of the powerful part that bankers can play in society. The world's largest banking house still fills that role. After all, it was Jamie Dimon, current CEO of JPMorgan, whom Janet Yellen phoned first when turmoil roiled the industry this past spring.
And in the odd chance that there's a certain blue-eyed 20-something-year-old that defied the odds by making it to this review — I do hope you'll reach out. I promise I'm reading something more interesting now.
