The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  They saw each other twelve times before they decided to marry. Or was it six? Maybe four. As a precautionary measure, her parents mandated a nine-month engagement and removed her temporarily to Shanghai. In the first of the scrapbooks in which she preserved the paper record of their life together, mementos crowd the first page. “Looking forward with pleasure to this evening,” reads his handwriting on a cream-colored card—the kind that arrives with flowers—which she’s annotated, “First token ever from ES to HS.” Three place cards, pocketed after a dinner party and fitted into photographic corners, find Mr. Edgar Scott seated between Miss Yarnall on his left and Miss Montgomery on his right. In a telegram sent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, not long afterward, he signs off, “Miss you painfully. Oceans of love.” By Thanksgiving: “I’m spoiled by now—and a dinner at which I don’t sit next to you seems like nothing on earth.” By Christmas, all is settled. “Life isn’t what it was; and the most important trouble is that life isn’t what it will be,” he writes to her. “I can’t help thinking and thinking about that—and realizing that every minute of life without you is a minute of life lost.” His cousins, he reports, have fired questions and insinuations at him all evening: “God knows how I had the strength not to scream at them: ‘Yes! Yes!—And she loves me!’”

  The Colonel was evidently not overjoyed. It seems he’d made a point of pinning down the lineage of the man who’d captivated his eldest. He knew that Edgar’s mother was a member of an admired Boston family of bankers, writers, and so on. She’d grown up in Philadelphia’s desirable Rittenhouse Square. But Edgar’s paternal grandfather, the railroad baron and an assistant secretary of war, had started out as a mere tavern owner’s son. “At least the mother is from a good family,” the Colonel is said to have sniffed, sideswiping the most accomplished forebear in memory on either side of the family.

  That wouldn’t be the last dig he’d take at a man one of his daughters hoped to marry. Mary Binney, who played at Carnegie Hall at seventeen and recorded the Carnival of the Animals with the Philadelphia Orchestra, fell in love with Stokowski. Divorced and twenty-five years older than her, he’d go on later to marry an heiress, divorce again, and marry another heiress. Visiting the big house, he’s said to have been so appalled by the piano in the ballroom that he bought Mary Binney a Steinway. “He may have bought it, but I paid for it,” the Colonel is said to have snarled. Stokowski was not the husband the Colonel or Muz had envisioned for their second daughter. A butler at the big house would later tell the story of a visit by Stokowski. Heading out for a walk, Mary Binney offered him one of her father’s hats. Later, after Stokowski had returned the hat, her father instructed the butler to have it cleaned—and, once it was cleaned, is said to have commanded, “Now burn it.” The Montgomerys forced Mary Binney to break off the affair with Stokowski—an act said to have nearly killed her. “I will not have you marry a fiddle player,” the Colonel is said to have told her. In another version of the story, he says, “I will not have you marry that Polack.” Maybe he said neither, or both.

  Edgar Scott was not from Poland and he didn’t play the fiddle. But his grandmother on his father’s side was the daughter of a banker and onetime mayor of Pittsburgh named Riddle. The Colonel, it seems, had doubts about the Riddles. Perhaps the prospect of his eldest daughter leaving the nest had gotten him thinking. Maybe he was feeling, at that moment, that he’d accomplished much of what he’d set out to do. He’d reversed the sagging trajectory of the Montgomery family fortunes. He’d married a woman with the temperament and inheritance to indulge him. He’d constructed a world grand enough to match his sense of himself. He’d created a structure, in property and trusts, that could minimize the exposure of his wealth to taxes and hold his family together into the future. Did the prospect of his eldest child’s marriage leave him to wonder about forces beyond his control?

  “She can’t marry him,” the Colonel is said to have fumed. “He’s a Riddle, and the Riddles are drunks.”

  Chapter Three

  A few months after my grandfather’s death in 1995, his sole surviving sister paid me a visit. She was eighty-eight years old, widowed, and living alone in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I was a half century younger, on maternity leave, with a newborn baby, living in an apartment across town. She arrived by taxi as the afternoon sun was turning the faces of the apartment buildings along Broadway a rosy pink; when I answered the doorbell, she was standing on the elevator landing, leaning on a cane. She had the legs of a shore bird, which I’d always admired. Her expression was humorous: Expect the unexpected, it seemed to say. She’d taught drama and literature at schools in Manhattan for years—so memorably that, when her eldest son took his children to tour boarding schools in New England, teenagers loped over to report that his mother had introduced them to Shakespeare and they’d remember the experience as long as they lived. After a successful stint in rehab in her seventies, she’d found a late-in-life calling as a pillar of the recovering-alcoholic subset of the summer population on the island in Maine where she had a house. Now, in my sparsely furnished living room, my father’s aunt Anna settled into a high-backed chair and accepted tea. When I asked if she’d mind if I nursed the baby, she chortled. “Mind?” she said. “I’m envious!”

  After the tea had been downed, she extracted from her bag a black-and-white photograph. In it, four people were seated on the steps of what appeared to be a large house constructed in part from massive blocks of stone. The group included a man, a woman, and a small boy seated between them. A uniformed nurse sat nearby. The man looked like a character out of an Edwardian drawing-room comedy: Tall and soigné, he was appareled in a boater hat, bow tie, vest, jacket, light-colored trousers, and dress shoes so well polished they gleamed. A walking stick rested in the circle formed by his folded hands. The woman, more handsome than beautiful, sat straight-backed in a high-collared shirt, bow tie, and ankle-length skirt. She smiled toward the camera, but her body was oriented toward the child. Beneath a broad-brimmed hat, fine blond bangs parted across the boy’s forehead. Something familiar winked at me from his small, round face. I squinted at the photograph, puzzled. I could identify no one. I was certain I’d never seen the house.

  “Chiltern,” my great-aunt said. “Nineteen hundred. The first summer.”

  The early life of the boy in the photo—my grandfather, the eldest brother of Anna— was unknown country to me. Looking back now, it seems as if his history had been packed in a hatbox and stashed in an attic. Like a Punjabi bride, he’d moved in with his in-laws, Helen Hope’s parents, upon marrying her in 1923. He’d lived with them for more than a year while the Colonel’s architect built a home for him and Helen Hope out of the ruins of an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse. Six years later, he’d gone into business with his father-in-law. He’d spent his entire career in that firm, just as he’d spent all of his adult life on his father-in-law’s estate. If people came to think of the Montgomery place as the Scott place, it was only because Helen Hope had taken Edgar Scott’s last name. There was no mistaking the fact that she was in charge—of the farm, of the place, of their household, of him. He was the Duke of Edinburgh, absorbed into the Windsor family fold. The arrangement appeared to suit him just fine. But I now know that my grandfather, Edgar Scott, never lost sight of the fact that the house he lived in wasn’t his. A few days after Helen Hope’s death, their eldest son stopped by to see his newly widowed father. At ninety-six, his father was losing his marbles. Nevertheless, he maneuvered briskly to the point. To my uncle, he said, “Now you can throw me out, if you want to.”

  At the time of my great-aunt’s visit and the presentation of the photograph of my grandfather as a small boy, I knew only a few facts about his earliest years. Born in Paris in 1899, he was said to have spoken French before English. He’d grown up largely in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania—a place I’d never been, though I now see it was only eleven miles away. He’d had a brother who’d died in the Pacifi
c in World War II. His grandfather had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad; I knew that because my father had said Lincoln had ridden in Thomas Scott’s private railroad car. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties, killing time in a bookstore and flipping through the index of a book on robber barons, that it dawned on me that Thomas Scott had been one himself. As for the robber baron’s son, my great-grandfather, I barely recall anyone speaking of him, ever. In all my grandfather’s letters to my grandmother, I found he mentioned his father just once. The silence was so complete, it had never entered my mind to ask why. As my uncle later told me, “The Scotts were people who could just erase.”

  It would take me years to figure out what had been expunged from the record.

  An almost life-size portrait of Thomas Scott, robber baron/forebear, hung on a wall in the library of my parents’ house. In the portrait, he’s a pink-faced man with muttonchop side whiskers the color of smoke, in the style favored by steamship and railroad tycoons. Scott also happens to have been partially disabled as a result of injuries suffered when an engine in which he was riding derailed, tossing him out of the train and onto his head. You wouldn’t know that from the portrait. He looks every inch “the Pennsylvania Napoleon,” as a New York newspaper editor once called him, “ambitious to take possession of the republic under a nine hundred and ninety-nine year lease.” After my father’s death, my brother, Elliot, entertained himself over the years by hanging the enormous portrait in a series of unpretentious apartments and houses he occupied in river towns along the Hudson. Once, after a store-window designer saw it in Elliot’s living room and rented it from him for a couple of months, the Pennsylvania Napoleon could be glimpsed through a thicket of three-piece suits, twill trousers, and dress shirts in the window of a Ralph Lauren store in SoHo—a Gilded Age apparition returned to help sell haberdashery to aspiring nabobs of the new gilded age.

  Just about the only detail I seemed to retain about Thomas Scott was a single, unforgettable quotation. It was said to date from around the time of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the first major rail strike, described by Albert J. Churella, the author of a history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, as “the beginnings of the age of industrial and class warfare in the United States.” Four years into the longest recession in American history, and in response to new wage cuts and work rules, train crews in Maryland and West Virginia walked off the job. Then a strike broke out in Pittsburgh, where railroad workers blockaded the yards. People with other grievances against the railroad joined the protest. So did factory and mill workers and others whom the recession had left homeless and unemployed. After National Guard troops were called in, members of the crowd attacked them. Troops fired back, killing at least ten people and wounding many more. Protesters looted gun shops, seizing weapons. Someone lit a freight car on fire, and the blaze spread; other cars, filled with coke and oil, burst into flames. Roundhouses, an engine house, a machine shop burned. Troops killed more rioters. After three days, one hundred twenty-six locomotives and sixteen hundred freight and passenger cars had been destroyed. The railroad estimated the damage to its property at two million dollars. Ever since that time, Thomas Scott, then in his third year as the railroad’s president, has been quoted as having suggested the rioters be given “a rifle diet for a few days, and see how they like that bread.”

  He was perhaps, some have said, the quintessential railroad man of his generation. Yet neither a biography nor a major collection of his personal papers exists. He’s said to have appended to his business correspondence, like a postscript, the words “Destroy this letter.” In the ironing-room archive, I exhumed no more than a dozen pieces of correspondence involving Thomas Scott, nearly all dating from the last years of his life. At his death, he even managed to keep secret the valuation of his estate. These days, the Pennsylvania Napoleon is largely forgotten. Among the few who still recognize the name, he’s remembered primarily as a mentor to Andrew Carnegie, Scott’s telegraph operator, chief assistant, and secretary at age seventeen. Others know only the rifle diet—or variations on that theme. In the 1970s, when labor history was on the rise, a fellow Harvard undergraduate, presenting himself as a man of the people, asked my sister, Hopie, whether she was a descendant of “Thomas ‘Machine Gun’ Scott.” It was the first time she or I or Elliot had heard the story. From then on, on the infrequent occasions when Thomas Scott was mentioned in our presence, we’d snort knowingly, “Give ’em a machine gun diet!” The snort was a performance of worldly-wise cynicism—a hedge against being implicated in a history we’d barely begun to understand.

  Thomas Scott, I now know, was the sixth (or possibly seventh) of the nine surviving children of a tavern owner in a hamlet on the turnpike that ran between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. By birth and circumstance, he was endowed with charm and a capacity for ceaseless work. Orphaned at twelve, he went to work as an assistant to the collector of tolls on the state road in Columbia, Pennsylvania; he was chief clerk by eighteen. Hired at twenty-seven as a station agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he became general superintendent at thirty-five. A year later, he held the second-highest administrative position. Over the next fifteen years, he and J. Edgar Thomson, his predecessor as president, turned what had been merely a Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh carrier into a six-thousand-mile system of railroads stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. Speculating in real estate, lumber, and other lucrative enterprises along the railroad’s right-of-way, they became key figures in a high-powered investment group with interests in transportation, oil, minerals, and coal. Their influence eventually extended as far as New Orleans, Colorado, Arizona, and Mexico. At the height of their careers, they controlled not only the biggest freight carrier in the world but the most profitable corporation in North America.

  Operating out of an office next to the state’s legislative chambers, Scott applied the full force of his personality, as well as bribery, to bending the Pennsylvania legislature to his will. As vice president of the railroad, he masterminded a successful campaign to convince the legislature to repeal the tonnage tax levied on the railroad, in part by promising to send branch lines through elected officials’ communities in return for their support. The railroad became, as William G. Roy puts it, “a single force so formidable that the government became its subject rather than its master.” It developed a reputation, Churella writes, “as a company whose officers—particularly Scott—would stop at nothing in their efforts to manipulate the political process.” As assistant secretary of war during the Civil War, Scott was in charge of all military railroads and government telegraphs. Though he resigned after a year amid allegations of conflict of interest, he returned to service the following year as an Army colonel and oversaw the transport of thirteen thousand troops with artillery wagons and horses from Virginia to Chattanooga—“the greatest mass movement of troops by rail up to that time.”

  Thomas Scott had his share of disasters, too. His failed attempt in the 1870s to build a transcontinental railroad through Texas and the Southwest brought huge losses upon himself, Edgar Thomson, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. During the disputed presidential election of 1876, he’s been said to have played a pivotal role in the Compromise of 1877, the deal that settled the election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes and resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction. In light of which, it may seem trifling to note that he may never have uttered the words “rifle diet.” The infamous quotation first appeared in a Chicago publication affiliated with a short-lived antimonopolist party in the late 1870s. It resurfaced in labor journals and anticapitalist diatribes but, it seems, not in the mainstream press. The most thorough contemporaneous account of the riots—the report of a Pennsylvania General Assembly investigating committee—makes no mention of any such statement. “Tom Scott was one of the most consistently and thoroughly vilified business executives in the nineteenth century,” Churella told me when I asked him
about the story. “Some of this he brought on himself, but much of this was undeserved—call it ‘sour grapes’ from people whom he outwitted.” When dealing with any quotation attributed to Scott, Churella suggested, “It is useful to remember Yogi Berra’s line about ‘I really didn’t say everything I said.’”

  One year after the 1877 railroad strike, Scott suffered the first of a series of strokes that would eventually kill him. In what’s been said to have been his one and only vacation, he took his wife and two of his children abroad to try to recover. When recovery eluded him, he resigned from the presidency of the railroad just six years into his tenure. By May 1881, he was dead at fifty-seven. Two thousand people turned out to watch the sixteen-carriage cortege that accompanied Thomas Scott’s casket from his country home in Lansdowne to a cemetery carved out of an eighteenth-century estate overlooking the Schuylkill River in West Philadelphia. Railroad men from the Union Pacific, Texas and Pacific, Baltimore and Ohio, and other railroads were present. Railroad presidents and vice presidents carried the coffin. At the graveyard, where winding carriageways meandered beneath English elms, Scott was buried among the tombs of Civil War heroes, surgeons, artists, architects, and inventors. For thirty days, the locomotives, railroad cars, stations, and offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad were draped in black.

  My father had some interest in his great-grandfather’s story. He hung the portrait of Thomas Scott on the library wall. A fading back issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, with an article about Thomas Scott, had a permanent berth on a magazine table in the living room, where lesser periodicals were regularly culled. I regret now my lack of curiosity about old Machine Gun back then; I’d have liked to have asked my father what the family tie meant to him. I have the impression that the famous forebear’s ghost occasionally stalked at least a few of his descendants. If Thomas Scott was a source of pride, he was also a reproof. The tavern owner’s son, after all, wasn’t simply the original self-made Scott: You might also wonder if he was the last.