Morrow

Morrow, Dwight Whitney

ACHIEVEMENT(S): US Ambassador

NICKNAME/ALIAS: None

DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 11 January 1873, at Huntington, WV

DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 5 October 1931, in Englewood, NJ. Aged 58

DISCIPLINE: Politician

FIELD: Politics

LANGUAGE: English

PARENTS: James Elmore Morrow and Clara Johnson

SIBLINGS: Jay Johnson (later governor of the Panama Canal Zone)

SPOUSE: Elizabeth Reeve Cutter, married 1903

CHILDREN: Four children, second daughter Anne

EDUCATION: Amherst College, 1891-95; Columbia Law School, 1896-99

MAJOR WORK: None

LIFE AND TIMES: After graduating from Columbia with distinction in 1899, Morrow

joined the corporate law firm Simpson Thacher, where he quickly proved himself one of the shrewdest corporate lawyers in the city.

Morrow settled in Englewood, New Jersey - at that time a favourite area of New York's banking and legal elite - and over the next few years he decided to enter politics. In 1911, he helped draft New Jersey's workmen's compensation laws, and in 1917 he prepared a report for the state's Prison Inquiry Commission which led to prison reform in New Jersey.

After America's entry in World War I in 1917, he served as a director of the National War Savings Committee for New Jersey. In 1914, Morrow was offered a partnership in the investment bank JP Morgan* & Co, located at 23 Wall Street. Although he knew that this would made his future career in politics difficult, Morrow accepted the job and remained there until 1927.

Through their efforts, before American involvement in the war Morgan played a pivotal role in helping the Allies to float loans on the American market and in organizing the centralized purchase of food, munitions, and supplies necessary to sustain the war effort. After the war, the company took the lead in arranging reconstruction loans for Britain and France, and also for the defeated Central Powers. During these years, Morrow's Morgan partnership made him an international financial figure.

In early 1918, Morrow traveled to Europe as an adviser to the Allied Maritime transport Council (AMTC), based at Versailles, France, which in the last year of the war played a vital role in resolving international Allied conflicts over the allocation of scarce shipping resources, and of manpower and supplies.

As U.S. expert on the imports subcommittee of the AMTC, Morrow brought his exceptional negotiating skills to a variety of logistical problems facing the major powers. In 1921-22 Morrow became involved in Latin American affairs, helping to solve Cuba's financial problems.

Morrow continually hoped Coolidge would appoint him to high office, but he was repeatedly disappointed. In 1925, having been for some time a trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics, he was made chairman of a government aircraft board, organized to study the employment of aircraft in national defence and to formulate a national military and civil aviation policy. It was not until 1927, when Coolidge had decided not to stand for further election, that Morrow was given a major position, as ambassador to Mexico, and he finally gave up his partnership at Morgan.

Morrow served as ambassador to Mexico from October 1927 to September 1930, during which time he worked hard to improve relations between that country and the United States. In Mexico, Morrow befriended Lindbergh*, after his celebrated non-stop flight there, who in 1929 married Morrow's second daughter, Anne.

In 1930, with President Hoover now in office, Morrow was appointed a delegate to the London Naval Conference, where he succeeded in getting Britain, France and Germany to accept size limitations on cruisers and smaller ships (the restriction led to the German building of pocket battleships like the Admiral Graf Spee*).

In the autumn of 1930 Morrow ran for senator for New Jersey on a platform opposing prohibition (which he abhorred both as a matter of public policy and private conduct), and won easily, becoming in the process a national political figure. During the following year, having resigned his ambassadorial post, although he attended Congress only once, he became a powerful figure in Hoover's administration, and in June 1931 he persuaded the president to proclaim the "Hoover moratorium", a one-year cessation on war debt and reparations payments.

In September that year he died of a cerebral haemorrhage.

ASSESSMENT: He was an important adviser to several international commissions aimed at resolving post-war European and U.S. conflicts of interest.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None

ONELINER: Dwight Morrow, US ambassador and Lindbergh’s father-in-law

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

EB, ADNB

Nicolson, Harold, Dwight Morrow, London: Constable & Co., 1935