Relationship Banker: Eugene W. Stetson, Wall Street, and American Business, 1916?959

In this biography, Hunt (law and Eugene W. Stetson School of Business and Economics, Mercer U.) examines the career of banker Eugene W. Stetson (1881-1959), who became a vice-president with the Guaranty Trust Company of New York, a "Morgan Bank," in 1916. He describes how Stetson became president and chairman of Guaranty and survived World War I and its aftermath, the stock-crazed 1920s, the transformation of banking in the Depression, and the demands of World War II, as well as his role in the merger of Guaranty and Morgan in a series of combinations that eventually produced JPMorgan Chase. He focuses on influences and beliefs that shaped his career, his upbringing in the post-Reconstruction South, his attitudes toward business and community, and his beliefs about wealth, and contends that Stetson achieved all this through his skill at creating and sustaining personal relationships, with individuals such as Coca-Cola's Robert Woodruff, financier and railroad baron Averell Harriman, IBM's Tom Watson, Sr., and Morgan's Thomas Lamont. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)