All We Know: Three Lives Read Online Free
regarded as the official orator of the…Association” and was in such demand as an after-dinner speaker, to business groups and private clubs, that he spent most of his evenings out.
Bald, clean shaven, meticulously tailored, he would hold himself rigid, clasp his hands behind his back, and speak in a “clear fluent monotone.” His talks were a series of epigrammatic utterances, strung together cleverly and recycled frequently, with just a glancing mention of the group he was addressing. He timed himself ruthlessly. His themes were government, business, history, alcohol, and taxation. (The excise tax on business income and the graduated personal income tax were introduced in 1913.) He cited Macaulay, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Greeks. The need to pay tribute to a prominent man of the day, often the guest of honor at such occasions, meant that he spent a certain amount of time musing about success and flattering his audiences. “He who breeds thoroughbreds must be a thoroughbred himself” was “an aphorism that elicited the liveliest applause” at the Horse Show banquet of 1904. He was compared to Mark Twain and other entertaining orators of the previous century. His characteristic rhetorical gesture was an ostensibly serious or paradoxical statement followed by a deflating quip. “The art of speaking is to say nothing—briefly,” he observed, more than once. “But the tragedy of it is the less a man has to say the more difficult he finds it to stop.” Paradox and didacticism were also the style of the advertising copy for his firm, which he wrote. “Buying inferior articles to save money is like stopping the clock to save time,” ran one.
Esther’s prolix and imaginative verbal style shared little with her father’s disciplined and formulaic method. Even as a child, she performed constantly, testing her own and others’ authority. On a transatlantic voyage with her parents, age eleven, she initiated a trial on behalf of a passenger after she overheard him complain about his wife’s cigarette smoking, appointing herself prosecutor and choosing a jury. “Before we knew it there were a hundred people around her,” her mother wrote from on board the Amerika in June 1909. That summer, at the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel in Lausanne, a pinnacle of prewar leisure, Esther “instigated” a baseball game, corralling the guests into two teams, coaching those who did not know the game, again attracting a crowd. At home in New York, when her elderly nanny took her to Central Park for exercise, Esther would skate off, a gawky girl Pied Piper, pulling a group of children after her and mesmerizing them with terrifying “Edgar Allan Poe–ish” stories.
But if her style was unlike her father’s, she was shaped by his preoccupations and riveted by his political savvy. “History is simply a record of the failures of government,” Patrick Murphy told one audience. And: “History teaches us one thing only, and that is no statesman has ever learned anything from history.” At the Horse Show in 1907, he addressed the financial crisis of the preceding month. “We have had explosive financial fireworks,” he said of Theodore Roosevelt’s attempts to regulate big business, the collapse of confidence in the banking system, the failure of the trust companies, and J. P. Morgan’s rescue of these institutions after negotiations in Morgan’s home with a consortium of bankers.
Esther with the actor John Drew (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)
Happily…American difficulties have produced the great Americans. It is not alone in the battlefield that valor is displayed; courage may be shown even in an art library. No sounder pieces of American manhood have been put together than the group of financial statuary that defended American credit…In the lexicons of Morgan’s library there is no such word as fail.
For Murphy, too, there was no such word. But his success, which stemmed from his accomplishments in
Bald, clean shaven, meticulously tailored, he would hold himself rigid, clasp his hands behind his back, and speak in a “clear fluent monotone.” His talks were a series of epigrammatic utterances, strung together cleverly and recycled frequently, with just a glancing mention of the group he was addressing. He timed himself ruthlessly. His themes were government, business, history, alcohol, and taxation. (The excise tax on business income and the graduated personal income tax were introduced in 1913.) He cited Macaulay, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Greeks. The need to pay tribute to a prominent man of the day, often the guest of honor at such occasions, meant that he spent a certain amount of time musing about success and flattering his audiences. “He who breeds thoroughbreds must be a thoroughbred himself” was “an aphorism that elicited the liveliest applause” at the Horse Show banquet of 1904. He was compared to Mark Twain and other entertaining orators of the previous century. His characteristic rhetorical gesture was an ostensibly serious or paradoxical statement followed by a deflating quip. “The art of speaking is to say nothing—briefly,” he observed, more than once. “But the tragedy of it is the less a man has to say the more difficult he finds it to stop.” Paradox and didacticism were also the style of the advertising copy for his firm, which he wrote. “Buying inferior articles to save money is like stopping the clock to save time,” ran one.
Esther’s prolix and imaginative verbal style shared little with her father’s disciplined and formulaic method. Even as a child, she performed constantly, testing her own and others’ authority. On a transatlantic voyage with her parents, age eleven, she initiated a trial on behalf of a passenger after she overheard him complain about his wife’s cigarette smoking, appointing herself prosecutor and choosing a jury. “Before we knew it there were a hundred people around her,” her mother wrote from on board the Amerika in June 1909. That summer, at the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel in Lausanne, a pinnacle of prewar leisure, Esther “instigated” a baseball game, corralling the guests into two teams, coaching those who did not know the game, again attracting a crowd. At home in New York, when her elderly nanny took her to Central Park for exercise, Esther would skate off, a gawky girl Pied Piper, pulling a group of children after her and mesmerizing them with terrifying “Edgar Allan Poe–ish” stories.
But if her style was unlike her father’s, she was shaped by his preoccupations and riveted by his political savvy. “History is simply a record of the failures of government,” Patrick Murphy told one audience. And: “History teaches us one thing only, and that is no statesman has ever learned anything from history.” At the Horse Show in 1907, he addressed the financial crisis of the preceding month. “We have had explosive financial fireworks,” he said of Theodore Roosevelt’s attempts to regulate big business, the collapse of confidence in the banking system, the failure of the trust companies, and J. P. Morgan’s rescue of these institutions after negotiations in Morgan’s home with a consortium of bankers.
Esther with the actor John Drew (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)
Happily…American difficulties have produced the great Americans. It is not alone in the battlefield that valor is displayed; courage may be shown even in an art library. No sounder pieces of American manhood have been put together than the group of financial statuary that defended American credit…In the lexicons of Morgan’s library there is no such word as fail.
For Murphy, too, there was no such word. But his success, which stemmed from his accomplishments in
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