A Man & His Money

DWIGHT MORROW--Harold Nicolson-- Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

Biographies by Harold Nicolson (Paul Verlaine; Swinburne; Curzon) have been characterized by careful scholarship, an almost ostentatious avoidance of partisan feeling, a mood of suppressed irony. These qualities are all revealed in his biography of Dwight Whitney Morrow, lawyer, Morgan partner, Ambassador to Mexico, Senator from New Jersey, whose life receives at Harold Nicolson's hands an intelligent and exhaustive review such as few U. S. capitalists have enjoyed. Beginning with an apology for the inability of an English author to comprehend all the factors of a U. S. background, Harold Nicolson presents Morrow as a "completely civilized man," the possessor of an extraordinarily modern type of mind. His apology is misplaced, since Dwight Morrow reveals Nicolson's remarkable grasp of U. S. history, politics, social life, but nowhere establishes convincingly its subject's claim to originality, insight, achievement or potentiality.

Born in 1873 in Huntington, West Va., Dwight Morrow was frail, large-headed, stocky, suffered from terrible headaches all his life. His father's training in mathematics early gave him exact habits of mind; a badly-set broken arm that impaired his physical development provided another impetus to study. Attending Amherst on borrowed funds, putting himself through Columbia Law School by tutoring and going more deeply into debt, he struggled to get the maximum value from an education that cost him so much. As an energetic law clerk, his salary was increased from $720 a year in 1900 to $3,125 in 1903, and he was soon taken into his firm. With his tastes inclining him toward an academic career and a quiet family life, he had little interest in establishing a great fortune, underwent an extraordinary period of doubt, hesitancy, soul-searching, before accepting the offer of a Morgan partnership. The House of Morgan wanted him, his old friend Calvin Coolidge wrote, "not merely because of his talent, for talent was plentiful and easy to buy, but . . . for his character, which was priceless."

With a perceptible air of dogged determination, Harold Nicolson writes of Morrow's financial work in connection with the mutualization of Equitable Life Assurance Society, the reorganization of New York City's Interborough Rapid Transit, municipal financing, giving the impression that such labors were equally tedious to biographer and hero. Morrow's career in France during the War and as Ambassador seems to interest Nicolson more. In Mexico Morrow ruthlessly broke diplomatic traditions, communicated with the State Department by telephone, buttonholed minor officials, made friends with President Calles, effectively neutralized Mexican hostility to the U. S. A nervous man, he had a strange habit of tearing off the corners of papers he read, rolling them in his fingers, putting them in his ear, throwing them on the floor. He worked constantly, with concentration, and with a deepening sense that his advancement was less rapid than his labors should have secured for him.

After his success in Mexico, his work at the London Disarmament Conference was an anticlimax, while his political campaign, when he ran for Senator, filled him with disgust. Despite Harold Nicolson's insistence on the rarity of Dwight Morrow's achievement and intellect, both his career and personality seem conventional by U. S. standards. Morrow traveled the well-worn path from poverty to wealth, experienced a familiar disillusionment with his money, yearned, like most U. S. capitalists, for intellectual attainments.

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