Who Owned the Titanic? 🚢 J.P. Morgan's Shipping Trust, the IMM

🚢 Ask most folks who owned the Titanic and they will say the White Star Line. That is true, as far as it goes. But follow the money one step further and you land in New York, at a company called the International Mercantile Marine, and at the desk of J. Pierpont Morgan.

I hold a good stack of IMM stock certificates, in six different colors and issues, and every one of them is a little paper door into that story. So pull up a chair. This is the tale of the shipping trust that owned the most famous ship ever built, and what became of it.

⚓ What was the International Mercantile Marine Company?

The International Mercantile Marine Company, IMM for short, was a shipping trust. J.P. Morgan & Co. announced its founding on October 1, 1902, with a stated capital of $120 million. It was incorporated in New Jersey, the state whose easy corporate laws drew most of the big trusts of the day.

The idea was pure Morgan. He had already "Morganized" a good share of America's railroads, buying up rivals and reorganizing them into something he could manage. In 1895 he and the Rothschilds had even sold 3.5 million ounces of gold straight to the U.S. Treasury to shore it up in the hard years after the Panic of 1893. Now he wanted to do to the Atlantic crossing what he had done to the rails.

So IMM gathered up the lines. Clement Griscom brought the American and Red Star Lines. Bernard N. Baker brought the Atlantic Transport Line. John Ellerman brought the Leyland Line, and the Dominion Line came in too. And after long negotiations, in April 1902, J. Bruce Ismay brought the crown of the whole thing: the White Star Line.

🤝 How big was Morgan's shipping trust?

Big enough to scare a government. Morgan's people signed a partnership agreement with the two great German lines, Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd, in New York on February 20, 1902. It shared out dividends and routes between them.

Then came a deal with Lord Pirrie of Harland & Wolff in Belfast. From 1902 on, every ship IMM ordered would be built by Harland & Wolff. That one agreement is why Belfast built the Olympic, the Titanic and the Britannic.

Britain did not sit still. The trust led directly to the British government subsidizing Cunard's two new speed queens, the Lusitania and the Mauretania. Morgan's side had hoped for an American subsidy of its own through the Frye-Payne bill, but by April 1902 it was plain that bill was going nowhere.

🧊 Who owned the Titanic, really?

Here is the chain, link by link. The Titanic was a White Star ship. White Star was owned by IMM from 1902. And IMM was Morgan's company, bankrolled by J.P. Morgan & Co. and run in 1912 by its president, the same J. Bruce Ismay who had sold White Star into it.

Ismay became IMM's president in 1904, taking over from Clement Griscom. He was aboard the Titanic on her maiden voyage in April 1912, and he survived in a lifeboat. The press savaged him for leaving the ship while women and children were still aboard - some papers called him "J. Brute Ismay" - and he lived out his life quietly, summering at a cottage in Connemara, Ireland, until he died in 1937. He left the presidency the next year, and Harold Sanderson took over in 1913.

And Morgan himself? He had booked a luxury suite with its own private promenade deck for that maiden voyage. His plans changed and he never sailed. The story most often told puts him in France, at the spa town of Aix-les-Bains, taking the baths, and that empty suite has fed conspiracy theories ever since. He died in Rome less than a year after the sinking, on March 31, 1913, at 75.

If you want the full story of that night itself, I wrote it up in The Night Titanic Sank 🌊 What Really Happened in 1912. This post is about the company behind it.

🏛️ What did the Senate inquiry say about IMM?

The American inquiry opened on April 19, 1912, just four days after the sinking, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan chaired it, and Ismay was the first witness questioned. More than 80 witnesses testified or gave affidavits over 18 days of hearings, ending May 25.

Smith did not stop at the iceberg. He openly attacked the very principle of the company, and Morgan along with it.

Something good came out of it, too. Smith's findings called for enough lifeboats for everyone aboard, round-the-clock wireless contact, slower speeds in ice and extra lookouts. Together with the British inquiry, those findings reshaped safety at sea and fed into the Radio Act of 1912.

💸 Did IMM ever make money?

Not enough, and not for long. The trust was overleveraged and short on cash. It carried heavy debt through the 1900s and into the 1910s, and in late 1914 it defaulted on interest on its bonds.

A "friendly" receivership followed in 1915. Then the First World War, of all things, saved it. IMM came back out of receivership in 1916.

That same year Philip A. S. Franklin became president, and he held the job until 1936. Franklin is a fascinating figure. In April 1912 he ran White Star's affairs in New York, and he was the man who at first assured worried families the Titanic was in no danger. By 1918 he was chairman of the Shipping Control Committee, helping run American shipping in the war.

🇬🇧 What happened to the White Star Line?

IMM sold it. In 1926 the White Star Line went to Lord Kylsant's Royal Mail Steam Packet Company for £7 million. Only part of that was ever paid. When the Royal Mail group collapsed in the early 1930s, £2.35 million was still owing, and the scandal that followed, the Royal Mail Case, ended with Kylsant in prison.

White Star limped on into the Depression. The British government agreed to help, on one condition: White Star had to merge with its old rival. Cunard White Star became effective in May 1934, and the line that built the Titanic was folded in with the line that had run the Lusitania.

🇺🇸 What became of IMM after White Star?

It went all-American. In 1931 IMM merged with the Roosevelt Steamship Company to form the Roosevelt International Mercantile Marine Company. Later that same year it bought the struggling United States Lines.

That brought along the giant Leviathan, the former German liner Vaterland, seized by the United States in 1917. She was a money pit, losing more than half a million dollars in her first year under the new contract. But the company built new ships too: the Manhattan in 1932, the first ship actually built for the line, then the Washington in 1933 and the America in 1940.

In 1943 the old IMM name finally disappeared, and the company became United States Lines Inc. Under that name it ran the SS United States, which entered service in 1952 and took the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage as the fastest ocean liner ever built. She sailed the Atlantic until 1969, when jets had taken her passengers. Her last chapter belongs to Okaloosa County, Florida, which set out to sink her in the Gulf off Destin as the world's largest artificial reef.

Malcolm McLean, the container-shipping pioneer, bought United States Lines in 1978. It filed for bankruptcy on November 24, 1986, one of the largest bankruptcies in American history at the time. So the trust Morgan built in 1902 to rule the Atlantic ran, in one unbroken corporate line, for 84 years.

📜 What do IMM stock certificates look like?

They are beauties. The American Bank Note Company of New York engraved them, and its imprint sits right under the lower picture. ABN's fine geometric lathe-work, the interlacing patterns in the borders, was made to be close to impossible to forge by hand.

Across the top runs a harbor scene: a big four-funnel liner under a plume of smoke, with tugs and barges in front and a harbor building to the right. Down at the foot sits a draped woman with a pair of dividers and a set-square, a ship behind her, a tribute to shipbuilding and navigation.

The company name rides across a dark banner in big white capitals: INTERNATIONAL MERCANTILE MARINE COMPANY, "Incorporated under the laws of the State of New Jersey." They run about 12 by 8 inches.

🔍 Is that the Titanic in the vignette?

Collectors love to see Titanic's sisters in that liner, and you will find dealers who say the Olympic-class ships are pictured. It is a lovely story. Here is the catch.

The same harbor vignette is on an IMM Common Stock Trust Certificate dated December 1902, issued to J. Bruce Ismay himself and signed by him on the back. Its printed voting trustees are J. Pierpont Morgan, W. J. Pirrie, J. B. Ismay, Peter A. B. Widener and Charles Steele. Harland & Wolff was not authorized to build the Olympic trio until 1908.

So the engraving was in use six years before Titanic's class existed. In 1902 no White Star ship had four funnels at all. The first purpose-built four-funnel liner was Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse of 1897, from North German Lloyd, one of IMM's own partners. The ship on the certificate has no name on her hull, and nobody has ever proved which ship she is. She stands for the whole Atlantic trade, and that is how I tell it.

🔖 Why do some IMM certificates have JPM punched through them?

These are issued certificates, and when they were turned in they were cancelled. Some carry plain round punch holes. Others have tiny perforated letters punched right through the engraving, which dealers and collectors read as "JPM & Co." for J.P. Morgan & Co. Some sheets also carry an inked "Cancelled" stamp with J.P.M. & Co. on it.

Where the perforation lands is how I sort them: no perforated letters, letters through the top picture, or letters through the bottom one. Pick the one that speaks to you.

The registrar printed on many of them is a story of its own. The Central Trust Company of New York became the Central Union Trust Company in 1918, then merged with the Hanover Bank in 1929. Follow that line through Manufacturers Hanover and it runs right into today's JPMorgan Chase. The registrar's bank ended up under the Morgan name too.

🎁 Which IMM certificates do I have in stock?

Six of them, every one a real, issued and cancelled certificate from the company that owned the Titanic:

• 💚 The green 100-share Common certificate, the big one with the ONE HUNDRED share counters.
• 💙 The slate-blue 10-share Common certificate.
• 🤎 The brown Common certificate for less than 100 shares.
• 💜 The purple 6% Cumulative Preferred certificate, with PREFERRED across the face.
• 🩶 The grey 10-share Preferred certificate.
• 🍃 The light green 100-share Preferred certificate.

Lay two or three colors side by side in one frame and you have the whole trust on the wall. They make a wonderful gift for anyone who has ever stood in line for a Titanic exhibit.

❓ Quick answers

Did J.P. Morgan own the Titanic? Through IMM, yes. J.P. Morgan & Co. founded and financed IMM, and IMM owned the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic.

When was IMM founded? J.P. Morgan & Co. announced it on October 1, 1902. It was incorporated in New Jersey.

What did IMM become? Roosevelt International Mercantile Marine in 1931, then United States Lines Inc. in 1943. United States Lines went bankrupt in 1986.

Who printed IMM stock certificates? The American Bank Note Company of New York. Its imprint is on the certificate.

🚢 Thanks for reading, friends. Every one of these certificates was issued to a real holder by the company that owned the Titanic. That is a lot of history for a sheet of paper.