J.P. Morgan

In the panic of 1907, when the American banking system was hours from collapse and the federal government had no central bank to intervene, one private citizen stepped in and saved it. J.P. Morgan locked the nation's leading bankers in his Madison Avenue library and refused to let them leave until they had collectively agreed to shore up failing institutions. He was 70 years old. The episode made the case for the Federal Reserve — and demonstrated that no single man should ever again hold that much financial power.

John Pierpont Morgan spent fifty years assembling the architecture of American capitalism. He reorganized railroads, financed the creation of U.S. Steel — the first billion-dollar corporation in history — created General Electric, and twice rescued the U.S. government from fiscal crisis during the Gilded Age. His firm, which became J.P. Morgan & Co., was the most powerful private financial institution in the world, and Morgan himself was its unchallenged center of gravity.

His art collection rivaled Europe's great museums — he donated enormous quantities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and his library, now the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan, holds one of the finest collections of illuminated manuscripts on earth. The Pujo Committee's 1912 investigation found that Morgan and his associates held 341 directorships in 112 corporations — what critics called a "money trust" controlling the commanding heights of the American economy.