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246 THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND SINK THE LUSITANIA! 247
MORGAN CONTROL OVER SHIPPING
Banking was not the only business in which Morgan had a
strong financial interest. Using his control over the nation's railroads
as financial leverage, he had created an international shipping
trust which included Germany's two largest lines plus one of the
two in England, the White Star Lines. Morgan had attempted in
1902 to take over the remaining British line, the Cunard Company,
but was blocked by the British Admiralty which wanted to keep
Cunard out of foreign control so her ships could be pressed into
military service, if necessary, in time of war. The Lusitania and the
Mauretania were built by Cunard and became major competitors of
the Morgan cartel. It is an interesting footnote of history, therefore,
that, from the Morgan perspective, the Lusitania was quite dispensable.
Ron Chernow explains:
Pierpont assembled a plan for an American-owned shipping trust
that would transpose his "community of interest"
principle—cooperation among competitors in a given industry—to a
global plane. He created ... the world's largest [fleet] under private
ownership.... An important architect of the shipping trust was Albert
Ballin, whose Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line, with hundreds of
vessels, was the world's largest shipping company.... Pierpont had to
contend with a single holdout, Britain's Cunard Line.. . . After the Boer
War, the Morgan combine and Cunard exhausted each other in
debilitating rate wars." 1
As stated previously, Morgan had been retained as the official
trade agent for Britain. He handled the purchasing of all war materials
in the United States and coordinated their shipping as well.
Following in the footsteps of the Rothschilds of centuries past, he
quickly learned the profitable skills of war-time smuggling. Colin
Simpson, author of The Lusitania, describes the operation:
Throughout the period of America's neutrality, British servicemen
in civilian clothes worked at Morgan's. This great banking combine
rapidly established such a labyrinthine network of false shippers, bank
accounts and all the paraphernalia of smuggling that, although they
fooled the Germans, there were also some very serious occasions
when they flummoxed the Admiralty and Cunard, not to speak of the
unfortunate passengers on the liners which carried the contraband. 2
1 Chernow, .
pp 1 00-01
2. Colin Simpson, The Lusitania (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1 972), p. 50.
THE LUSITANIA
The Lusitania was a British passenger liner that sailed regularly
between Liverpool and New York. She was owned by the Cunard
Company, which, as previously mentioned, was the only major ship
line which was a competitor of the Morgan cartel. She left New York
harbor on May 1, 1915, and was sunk by a German submarine off
the coast of Ireland six days later. Of the 1,195 persons who lost their
lives, 195 were Americans. It was this event, more than any other,
that provided the advocates of war with a convincing platform for
their views, and it became the turning point where Americans reluctantly
began to accept, if not the necessity of war, at least its inevitability.
The fact that the Lusitania was a passenger ship is misleading.
Although she was built as a luxury liner, her construction specifications
were drawn up by the British Admiralty so that she could be
converted, if necessary, into a ship of war. Everything from the
horsepower of her engines and the shape of her hull to the placement
of ammunition storage areas were, in fact, military designs.
She was built specifically to carry twelve six-inch guns. The construction
costs for these features were paid for by the British government.
Even in times of peace, it was required that her crew include
officers and seamen from the Royal Navy Reserve.
In May of 1913, she was brought back into dry dock and outfitted
with extra armor, revolving gun rings on her decks, and shell
racks in the hold for ammunition. Handling elevators to lift
shells to the guns were also installed. Twelve high-explosive cannons
were delivered to the dry dock. All this is a matter of public
record at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England,
but whether the guns were actually installed at that time is still hotly
debated. There is no evidence that they were. In any event, on
September 17, the Lusitania returned to sea ready for the rigors of
war, and she was entered into the Admiralty fleet register, not as a
passenger liner, but an armed auxiliary cruiser] From then on, she was
listed in Jane's Fighting Ships as an auxiliary cruiser and in the British
publication, The Naval Annual, as an armed merchant man.
Part of the dry dock modification was to remove all the passenger
accommodations in the lower deck to make room for more
I. Simpson, pp. 17-28, 70.
the