Jack Morgan's Finest Hour

At the outbreak of World War II, Chrysler Corporation was awarded the lucrative government contract to build U.S. Army Tanks. To do so, Chrysler built a special assembly plant to manufacture both the M3 Lee and M4 Sherman tanks.  The problem for Chrysler was with the 30-piston engine the company had planned to power their tanks.  It was a technologic piece of magical engineering that would deliver a socko 485 horsepower, more than enough to make the lightweight, highly maneuverable Chrysler tank superior to anything the enemy might produce.  The problem was that while Chrysler's engineering staff could design a multibank engine that would include five (count 'em five) six-cylinder radial banks, that would drive a single crankshaft, the company lacked the technology to cast such a complex engine block.  No one did, except the Ford Motor Company, and Henry Ford was not about to share his company's secret of casting a complex engine blocks.  Period.  And Walter P. Chrysler, certainly didn't savor the idea of his world-beating tank being powered by what amounted to a Ford engine.

Someone was needed to negotiate a deal between these two proud, strong-minded business men.  What person could possibly negotiate such a sensitive and critical deal? With his legendary charm and considerable negotiating skills, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a reputation for changing the most hostile and obstinate's minds in Congress. But even he felt he wasn't up to it.  In the end he picked a determined enemy of Roosevelt's New Deal administration, the president of the prestigious and powerful House of Morgan.  Yes, the rich and influential JP Morgan commercial bank had financed the American Industrial Revolution, and helped finance both the Civil War, and the first World War. The counsel of J. P. "Jack" Morgan Jr, and his father before him, J.P. "Pierpont" Morgan, had been sought by presidents and kings, as well as by the captains of American industry.  For more than a century, when the House of Morgan spoke, the world stopped to listen.

Jack Morgan and his coteries of wealthy bankers, had fought like cats and dogs against FDR's effort to regulate the American banking industry. However, since the outbreak of World War II, Jack Morgan had exchanged his insatiateable appetite for even greater profits, for that of a red-white-and-blue patriotic American, and a decided supporter of FDR's valiant war effort.

Jack Morgan turned out to be the one man in America who knew both captains of the Detroit auto industry intimately, and managed to bring both CEOs to the negotiating table, and, with some arm-twisting, strike a deal. As a result, the famed M3 Lee and M4 Sherman tanks would become the first--and only--Ford-powered Chryslers, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The A57 Chrysler-Ford engine was as fine and impressive piece of American ingenuity you're likely to find anywhere (indeed, the bizarre, impossibly complex engine looks like something aliens from another world air-dropped in Detroit, while en route to Alfa Centauri).  Once housed in the Walter P. Chrysler Museum in Detroit (now defunct), the 30-cylinder engine is now on display in the Tank Museum in Duckworth, England.

The story doesn't end here. In a private meeting called by FDR, who was deeply concerned about the overwhelming public debt the U.S. war effort was generating, he asked Jack Morgan to analyze the numbers, and advise the president as to the results,  Morgan and his team of financial wizards, did so, and told FDR, to rest easy.  Having studied the potential of the post-war U.S. economy, Morgan and his elite financial analysts determined the U.S. debt would be paid down and be manageable by 1955.  After that the U.S economy would soar and become the envy of the world. As it turned out, Morgan's prediction was on the money, so to speak.

However, Jack Morgan wouldn't live long enough to see it.  Never happy, overweight and rarely in good health, Jack Morgan passed away in 1943.  Ironically, World War II turned out to be Jack Morgan's finest hour.

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