by Jill Jonnes
Like Rea, Alexander Cassatt was bone weary and looked forward to sailing abroad for his annual European sojourn. The Hepburn bill, the perplexing tunnel woes, the escalating costs of expanding the PRR’s complex and congested system, the depressed stock price, the vitriolic skepticism over his great New York project, the naysayers, all had taken a steady toll. There was also private heartbreak. Cassatt still mourned the death of his newly married older daughter, Katherine, who had died the previous year from goiter. This family tragedy had been compounded by the scandalous collapse of the marriage of his oldest son, Edward. His daughter-in-law’s suit for divorce and subsequent remarriage had made the front pages.
And so, late on the wet gray Sunday of May 8, Cassatt, his wife, Lois, a young granddaughter, and their maid and valet rode a hansom cab through the squalor of Manhattan’s West Side docks, past drays and wagons laden with cargo, their teamsters yelling and jostling, skirting the new electric traction streetcars and the ever-growing legions of noisy automobiles. Their destination was the White Star pier and the S.S. Baltic, sailing for England the next morning at six o’clock. In the rainy gloaming, the steamship was an impressive sight with its long ebony-black hull, gleaming white upper decks, two tan-and-black funnels, and four slender wooden masts bedecked with flags. Once aboard and settled in, his wife happily bustled about their luxurious staterooms. “I was so rejoiced,” she wrote of her husband, “that he could go and enjoy a complete rest.” As the ship sailed out at dawn the next morning with its escort of steam tugs, the skies were clearing. The ocean crossing was smooth, marked by restorative hours of sunning in deck chairs while stewards served tea, of leisurely strolls fore and aft, and the bracing elixir of copious sea air and breezes.
The Baltic docked in Liverpool Thursday May 17, and the Cassatts debarked with their steamer trunks to continue by train to London. That evening, as their cab drew up to the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge near Hyde Park, newspaper reporters surrounded them. The PRR president was startled to hear: “Would Mr. Cassatt be resigning?” While he was at sea, two days of Interstate Commerce Commission hearings had engulfed the Pennsylvania Railroad in a sensational corruption scandal. “RAILROAD OFFICIALS GOT RICH GIFTS OF STOCK” read the front page of the New York Times. “Jamison Says He Paid Cassatt’s Assistant $5,000/ Others Received Stock for Granting Favors in Coal Car Shipments.” As the London evening air grew chilly, the journalists persisted: Were the rumors true that he would retire, aggrieved at his colleagues’ deception? He waved them wearily aside. “I do not give interviews at home. I will not do so in England. I am here for a holiday and a rest.” With that he bid them good evening and entered the lobby.
Back across the Atlantic Ocean, the next day’s ICC hearings in Philadelphia were electric with tension as commission attorney William A. Glasgow Jr., all affability and charm, probed relentlessly. The front-page headlines again said it all: “Gifts to High and Low on Pennsylvania Railroad,” “$30,000 a Year From $500,” “Even Clerks Got Stock for Favors—Pennsylvania Announces Abuses Will Be Stopped.” Mercifully, when Glasgow finished grilling Friday’s witnesses, he announced that there would be no further hearings until the following Wednesday. In Cassatt’s absence, Captain John Green, first vice president, described the revelations of coal stock “gifts” to PRR employees and “acceptance of gratuities by its employees [as] a surprise to the management…[No such] ownership or practice…will be tolerated.”
That night a beset Captain Green wrote Cassatt a long letter, both about the important and much-needed $50 million bond offering they hoped to float with French bankers, a pioneering financial first, and of course about the burgeoning ICC scandal. Green enclosed a newspaper story and editorial from the Philadelphia Ledger, expressing worry that “the public will be strongly impressed with the conviction that an improper state of things exists among our operating people.” The letter was sent to London on the fastest steamship. Green hoped the worst was over.
As if the exploding ICC investigation was not woe enough, Alfred Noble’s East River tunnel troubles had deteriorated from bad to dire. The tunnels were behind schedule and costs were mounting ruinously. The air blows were now so huge that spectators gathered in the balmy May sunshine by the busy river just to watch the small geysers of river water broiling up violently next to the new Long Island Rail Road ferry slips. Two of the four slips were so undermined they were listing and, of course, unusable. The problem, one idled sandhog told a New York Times reporter, was that just when the engineers thought the shield would be hitting rock, they struck quicksand. “The sand oozed into the shield like water…The air shot out with an awful noise punching a hole through the crust of the river bed. After that we were only able to work on one of the tubes, and now that one has a blow-out.” Six air compressors were operating at full tilt to keep the river out of those tubes, while the PRR built additional compressor capacity at top speed.
The spectacle of intermittent geysers churning and gushing was complemented by the mesmerizing sight of hundreds of men in giant scows frantically dumping tons of bags filled with clay and cement into the river around the clock. Henry Japp confided, “It takes an enormous heap of clay to make the least bit of river bed, as the tide carries it away. But in the Thames River bed we did not find quicksand or silt such as we found here in the East River.” As the compressed air pressure in the fourth tube rose before the last blow, there was yet another sandhog casualty reported in the newspapers, this time from the dreaded “bends.” Hans Brinkman, twenty-nine, a big Swede nicknamed Blondy, had staggered out of the Manhattan tunnel shaft the evening of Friday May 19 after his shift and crumpled to the earth in pain. The PRR physicians rushed him to New York Hospital, where he was treated with oxygen, but died after twelve hours of agony.
And then, to add to the pall of corporate gloom, there was the sorry fate of the PRR sidewheeler ferryboat Baltimore. At the height of the evening commute on Wednesday May 16, the Baltimore departed the Jersey City slip at 5:05 p.m., heading diagonally across the Hudson for Desbrosses Street. Suddenly Captain George Fowler spied a lighter, the Greenwich, laden with pig iron, bearing down upon them. Even as the ferry’s engines thrust into reverse, the Greenwich plowed into its hull, gashing a giant hole and tossing passengers about the deck. The Baltimore limped into the Desbrosses Street ferry slip, debarking its shaken passengers and four teams before half-filling with water and sinking.
In the midst of all these woes, the PRR’s press bureau was very pleased—at long last—to be allowed to arrange the release of the first stunning drawings of Charles McKim’s design for Pennsylvania Station. (A scale model had been on display in Saint Louis at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.) There were bird’s-eye views of an austere Roman temple exterior with its colonnade of towering Doric pillars, along with dramatic renderings of the General Waiting Room and the train concourse. In a three-page press release (embargoed until Sunday May 20), the PRR instructed, “In appearance [Penn Station] is a wide departure from the conventional railway station. One misses the turrets and towers and more than all the lofty arched train shed, but as the principal function of this station is performed underneath the streets, the upward and ordinary signs of a railway station are naturally absent.” Here, finally, New Yorkers could get their first inkling of the full nobility of McKim’s building, slated to arise from that gigantic hole on Seventh Avenue.
The many battling New York papers vied to prepare suitably grandiose Sunday coverage of these first views, devoting entire pages to McKim, Mead & White’s striking architectural drawings. But then Pulitzer’s Evening World broke the story on Wednesday May 16. The rest of the press, having been scooped, canceled their elaborate Sunday layouts and treated the station as old news. A chagrined McKim could only console himself that the world could see that the PRR was committed to erecting a magnificent New York terminal.
By now, McKim had sufficiently recouped from his breakdown of the previous year to spend several hours a day at his offices in th
e Mohawk Building. By and large, the design for Pennsylvania Station was complete. William Symmes Richardson, who had just been made a McKim, Mead & White partner, looked to many of the station’s final details. While the station looked classical, the building techniques would be modern, featuring “a steel skeleton with curtain wall construction. A grid of 650 concrete-covered steel piers, spaced around the train tracks, [would carry] the weight of the structure down to bedrock. Above these footings [would rise] a complex steel structure that took engineers about two years to design.”
Of the two construction companies bidding on the $25 million station contract, William Mead favored the Charles T. Wills Company, while Samuel Rea preferred the George A. Fuller Company, whose president was Paul Starrett. Rea had talked to Henry C. Frick, who was “very much down” on the Fuller Company after a dispute over their construction of his Pittsburgh office building, but Rea still believed that Fuller was “stronger and better able to carry out big work.” And so Rea wrote Cassatt in late February of 1906: “Notwithstanding Mr. Frick’s severe arraignment of the company, I believe they are the best people to do the work. If you would like to see them personally I can arrange [it]…You understand that they have their own iron workmen and could erect all the steel work in the building for us, as well as set the granite and do other things. [Starrett] said they would sublet the fine marble work.”
By late May, Paul Starrett and the George A. Fuller Company had won the contract. Construction would soon start on one section, while the blasting and digging moved steadily along further east toward Seventh Avenue.
McKim’s health was sufficiently improved that he and Stanford White had begun arranging a trip north to visit their old friend and sometime collaborator, the ailing sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. White, all charm and exuberance, wrote Saint-Gaudens: “We are coming up to bow down before the sage and seer we admire and venerate so. Weather be damned; and roads too!…I am a pretty hard bird to snare, and, as for Charlie, he varies ten thousand times more than a compass does from the magnetic poles, so all this may end in smoke.”
In truth, McKim was still deeply worried about his dear friend White. The two were inextricably bound by decades of personal and professional friendship, and a shared devotion to beauty. White, who had always reveled in the risqué and the tweaking of bluenoses, seemed to be getting more reckless. Back in 1895 he had organized the Pie Girl Dinner, a “stag event at which scarcely clad nubile and nearly nude young women served the wine—a blonde for the white and a brunette for the red—and a young woman called Susie Johnson jumped naked or clad in gauze (accounts differ) out of a pie, accompanied by canaries.” When word of the dinner leaked out, White delighted in the scandal, unlike Mead and McKim, two of his guests. Now, McKim feared White was whirling toward self-destruction, what with his huge debts and insatiable appetites for collecting, for spending, for work, and for rapacious dissipation.
Over in London, Alexander Cassatt blithely pressed on with his enjoyable routine of fittings with his English tailors and outings to horse breeders. His longtime assistant Patton cabled on Tuesday May 22: “All well. Hope you will not allow sensational newspaper reports to interfere with your vacation. Your name has never been mentioned and there has been no intimation by [Interstate Commerce] Commission of their desire to have your testimony. Your offer to testify is well understood by public.” In fact, things were not well. What Cassatt could not know as he rode horses in Hyde Park was that William Randolph Hearst, now an East Side congressman, had his eye on the New York governor’s seat and his powerful papers were calling for blood, darkly predicting “criminal charges against a number of Pennsylvania officials.”
Worse yet, the Wall Street Journal, long a faithful and vocal admirer of Cassatt’s “tremendous courage in his attitude on the affairs of the corporation,” reported that “It has been an open secret for some years that graft has pervaded the affairs of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Cassatt has been aware of the feeling that such a state existed…It will be readily recognized how difficult his position has been in attacking men who have been with the system for years.” One has to suspect that Cassatt, pushing forward his own vast, controversial projects, had chosen not to touch this explosive internal matter. And, one also suspects, Cassatt had no way of knowing the specifics that were now emerging in this embarrassing testimony. After all, if various small coal operators had not complained to the ICC when it began a general investigation of all the coal roads, who would ever have known? When the Roosevelt administration began pushing hard to reform the railroads and bring the worst to heel, who would have imagined that the forthright PRR would be their first big case?
The very next day, Wednesday May 23, when the ICC hearings resumed in Philadelphia’s Federal Building, the atmosphere was again highly charged, with grim-faced lawyers facing off. William Patton, the reluctant star witness, found himself roughly interrogated. After three contentious hours on the stand, the Wall Street Journal reported, “It was brought out that of about 7,000 shares which Mr. Patton had acquired to the value of $307,000, while he was the assistant to President Cassatt, he had not paid one cent in cash.” Moreover, as attorney Glasgow grilled his witnesses with silky finesse, he sought repeatedly to implicate Cassatt.
In the ensuing and increasingly adversarial hearings, there tumbled forth damning testimony showing high PRR officers accepting free coal company stock, petty clerks exacting large bribes, and men and coal companies claiming ruin when corrupt PRR employees discriminated against them in providing coal cars. The manager of one coal company testified that “owing to the lack of cars…[he] was almost driven out of business…When his company was rated at thirty or forty cars, it was supplied with four.” Other testimony suggested ample PRR cars were available for large, favored coal companies like Berwind-White. Captain Green tartly pointed out that PRR officers had once been encouraged to invest in coal companies to promote business along their lines. Nonetheless, times had changed. The PRR board responded to these accusations by authorizing a sweeping and unprecedented internal investigation.
Unaware of the growing scale of the ICC scandal, Cassatt crossed the Channel to Paris on Thursday May 24, anticipating loan negotiations leavened with a leisurely visit with Mary at her country house. Instead the Cassatts learned by telegram what they also read in the Paris edition of the New York Herald: “GRAFT DISCLOSURES CREATING A PANIC” with the subhead, “Mr. Cassatt Held to Blame.” His wife, Lois, later told her daughter, “As soon as I saw that I told your father there was but one thing for us to do and that was to return home at once, as I knew he would wish to help his friends and I felt the charges made could only be answered by him personally.” Cassatt quickly saw his sister and launched the critical negotiations with French bankers for a $50 million loan. The next morning, Friday May 25, as they prepared to depart, Cassatt opened the New York Herald and read yet more bad press from the ICC hearings: “Railroad Man Admits He Got Coal Company Cash.”
Later that Friday morning, Cassatt, his wife, granddaughter, and their two servants rushed into the cavernous Gare Saint Lazare with its familiar sooty smell and shrieks of coal-powered locomotives. They joined the crowds in the open terminal shed boarding the Hamburg-American steamship train for the port of Cherbourg and then boarded the fast line S.S. Amerika sailing for New York that very afternoon.
The Cassatts barely left their staterooms as ocean storms lashed sheets of rain upon their cabin portholes. Lois fumed at what she saw as “the outrageous action of the commission in Philadelphia and [its] criticism,” while her husband struggled with his rising distress at the whole imbroglio. Why was the Roosevelt administration making such an example of his road? Yes, his own employees had betrayed the PRR, but surely other corporations—more corrupt in all ways—had far worse sins to be aired? But even as Cassatt sailed from Cherbourg, yet another coal operator angrily testified that his business had been “practically ruined” when the PRR reduced shipping cars for his coal from forty-one hundred
cars in 1901 to five hundred in 1905. The reason, he told the ICC: “I suppose because I didn’t give the railroad officials shares of stock in our company.”
TWENTY
“DEATH STALKS ALONGSIDE THEM”
On Sunday morning June 3, passengers on the S.S. Amerika began to gather on deck, savoring the last of the sea air and anticipating the familiar landmarks of New York harbor. The morning was already warm and hazy. The yellow revenue cutter Hamilton sped toward them and soon a dozen newspapermen, wearing light summer suits and clutching straw boaters against the breeze, were climbing up the steamship’s wooden ladder and onto the deck.
The reporter for Hearst’s Journal American raced ahead to Alexander Cassatt’s stateroom, where the railroad president was staring out his porthole window. “Stalwart, deep-chested, but with shoulders bent and the massive, bowed head grayer by some degree than when he started abroad,” wrote the reporter in the melodramatic style of the Hearst empire, “there was a semblance of tragedy to the tall, silent figure. His flushed face was seamed with care; the once powerful jaws twitched and the mouth drooped at the corners.”
Cassatt, attired in his usual conservative vested dark suit with snowy starched shirt, high collar, and old-fashioned black cravat, paced back and forth. Visibly agitated, he declared he’d been “greatly surprised” by the scandal, and would never have gone abroad “had the situation, which now appears to exist, been disclosed or intimated to me in advance.” Cassatt, who had already declared to the Associated Press in a telegram that he would not resign, vehemently dismissed rumors of resignation as “nothing but a canard.” Otherwise, he had little to say. “My information is of the most meager sort, barely more than hearsay, and unconfirmed from any authoritative source…Hence, I am not really prepared to discuss my future actions.”