Weird People of History: George Walbridge Perkins I

J. P. Morgan as the vanguard party

This article primarily draws on Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, by Jonathan Levy (2012).

George Walbridge Perkins I was vice president of New York Life Insurance Company and a partner at J. P. Morgan & Co. This was the Gilded Age, the era of the trusts and the robber barons, and J. P. Morgan was one of the greatest. At the time, his U.S. Steel. accounted for 6.8% of U.S. GDP. From all this, you might expect Perkins to be greedy, ruthless, and unable to justify his behavior with anything other than “I could, and I wanted to, so I did.”

You would be wrong. No, Perkins was an idealist.

This was before the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Communist Revolution. Friedrich Hayek was still learning to toddle and say his first words. Society was enchanted with science and its discoveries, from Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs to those newfangled automobiles. It seemed obvious that soon society too would be scientifically managed. Eugenics would allow society to breed humans as intelligently as they bred dogs. And central planning would eradicate the wastefulness and inefficiency of the free markets.

In short, intellectuals were socialists.

Perkins rejected outright socialism. People had a sacred right to private property, which the socialists refused to acknowledge. He supported a third way, which had all the benefits of socialism without the disruptions to the social order: the monopoly.

Under a monopoly—fully vertically and horizontally integrated—businesses would no longer be subject to the arbitrary whims of the market or the unpredictable chaos of competition. No longer would anyone have to fear that a business would fail. No longer would a company be driven out of business by a cutthroat competitor. All would be orderly, controlled, and cooperative. Business would work like the universe itself. Freaks of Fortune quotes Perkins:

“How should we get on,” he pushed the metaphor, “if there were incessant competition between day and night, or a constant struggle for supremacy between the seasons?”

And in the universe of Business, the all-benevolent Designer was Perkins himself.