When Eliot Tried to Bilk Morgan

President Charles William Eliot's personal papers, released this year on the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot's death, show that Eliot tried in 1903 to bilk the financier J. Pierpont Morgan out of nearly a quarter of a million dollars to finance the construction of Harvard Medical School buildings.

Morgan had already pledged $1.1 million for the construction of three new buildings at the Medical School when Eliot wrote him in April 1903, informing him that because "prices for materials and labor have risen considerably," the buildings could actually cost more than $1.3 million.

Eliot did not directly ask Morgan to raise his contribution, but an appeal for more money was certainly strongly implied; Eliot asked Morgan if he would sanction building the Med School additions out of brick and stone instead of the grander marble that Morgan was expecting.

Eliot's last-minute appeal to Morgan was not, however, as sincere as it sounds--the cost overruns on the buildings were not unforeseen, but the result of a deliberate collaborative effort between Eliot and the buildings' architects to raise the costs of the buildings.

The motives for the scheme were apparently altogether noble ones. There were five new Med School buildings to be built, and Eliot had agreed to pay for three of them, with Harvard footing the bill for the remaining two. Eliot and the architects' effort was designed to put as much expense as possible into the financier's buildings so the considerably less flush University could keep its own costs down.

So in the summer of 1902 the architects, the venerable Boston firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, readjusted plans for the five buildings along those lines Eliot outlined, trying to plan a move, for instance, of the Comparative Pathology Department into a Morgan building.

"Briefly, what I am trying to do now," architect Charles A. Coolidge wrote Eliot in August 1902, "is take as much expense as possible out of the building which the College pays for..."

Eliot and the architects' scheme failed, however--the day after he got Eliot's letter about the cost overruns. Morgan fired back an acerbic letter firmly refusing to give any more money for the three buildings and adding, "I do not think the (Harvard) Corporation has quite any moral right to reduce the size of the buildings or change them materially in any way from the original drawings."

Much of the story of the buildings is lost because the architectural firm did not retain in its letters Eliot's instructions about the buildings. In any event, the money was obtained, and the five buildings were built--in the original gray Dorset marble, as it turned out. They are now the centerpiece of the Med School, solemnly dominating the grassy central quadrangle that they surround.