by Jill Jonnes
He then wearily excused himself, put on his high-crowned derby, picked up his walking stick, and escorted his little granddaughter on deck to enjoy the ship’s band as the Amerika sailed toward the Statue of Liberty. The Philadelphia reporters were shocked by Cassatt’s haggard appearance. He “seemed like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown…At times, when cross-questioned, his hands shook with the intensity of his inward excitement.” Despite some initial loquaciousness, Cassatt asserted that he knew only the sparest outlines of the scandal, repeating, “I don’t know,” “I can’t say,” “I don’t care to answer that.” Finally, the reporters took pity and retreated.
To avoid the clamoring mob of yet more New York press awaiting outside the customs shed at the Hamburg-American docks in Hoboken, Cassatt and his party boarded the PRR tug Lancaster and sailed straight for the Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal, where the familiar comforts of private car Number 60 awaited them for the ride to Haverford. Ensconced again in his Cheswold estate, Cassatt met for hours with his top officers and attorneys. By evening, he had rallied. His formal statement to the Associated Press ceded almost nothing and took a truculent tone. He “would not sacrifice faithful and efficient officers to a manufactured and mistaken public opinion…There had always been a shortage of coal cars during periods of every year, and in recent years this had been greatly aggravated by the great increase in the production of coal, notwithstanding the very large increase the company had made in equipment.”
He acknowledged some instances of wrongdoing, vowed to root it out, and offered to testify whenever called before the ICC. But he took umbrage at the press, chiding the newspapers for their shabby treatment of him and his company. Had they already forgotten that his management had “taken the company out of politics and done away with the free pass evil?” He decried politicians whipping up anticorporation fervor, a not-so-veiled rebuke of Roosevelt. The next morning, a hot muggy June day, Cassatt rode the local from Haverford to his Broad Street Station offices, declined to speak with the crowd of newspapermen, and closeted himself again with his officers.
Back in New York City, which was just as hot and soupy as Philadelphia, the PRR’s four East River tunnels were coming to seem an almost accursed enterprise. Even as Cassatt ran a gauntlet of reporters at Broad Street Station that Monday, the Manhattan coroner, George F. Shrady, announced an official inquiry into possible criminal negligence for “the unusual number of men” who had died since January. Despite the new clay blanket in place, the raised level of compressed air—from thirty-two to thirty-five pounds, pressure critical to keeping the river at bay—was exacting its own toll. Far too many sandhogs were dying from the bends.
Splashed across the front page of the New York Herald was an article headlined: “Say Death Stalks Alongside Them in Tunnels.” The newspaper estimated anywhere from thirty to fifty men had died since January. A tunnel medical attendant testified that in those five months “he had seen hundreds of men taken with the bends, and known of eleven men dying from the bends.” The PRR tunnel physician employed just since March 29 knew of three fatalities. The family of one Robert Griffert, deceased, was suing for fifteen thousand dollars, asserting that he was hired without a proper medical examination and had died “that same day at midnight after emerging from the tunnel.”
The workers complained bitterly of laxity in operating the all-important air locks, and the actual removal of the air gauges so no one knew just what the pressure was. The air in the tunnels was especially foul because the intake was near a gas house, the sandhogs charged. Everyone understood that digging tunnels was dangerous work, but Coroner Shrady accused S. Pearson & Son, the English contractors, of criminal negligence. Replied Pearson’s supervisor at the tunnels, “I do not see that this is the public’s affair. It is a matter concerning only the company and the men.” Shrady responded by empaneling a jury.
And so it was on Wednesday June 6, his third day back from Europe, that Alexander Cassatt found the Pennsylvania Railroad facing bitter and unflattering attacks on two fronts. The morning began with ICC attorney Glasgow cross-examining Joseph Boyer, the $225-a-month chief clerk of the PRR’s superintendent of motive power, a grim-faced balding man with a thin mustache. Responsible for purchasing all the coal for the PRR’s locomotives, Boyer reluctantly admitted that for three years he had received kickbacks of three to five cents a ton from several coal companies anxious to curry his favor and land big contracts with the mighty PRR. These pennies of graft had accumulated into the startling sum of $46,000.
“What did you do with the money?” asked Glasgow in his soft, southern accent.
“I kept it all,” admitted Boyer. And then there were the $14,000 worth of stocks Boyer also “kept.”
Cassatt promptly fired Boyer. The next day he dismissed a second clerk complicit in the same scheme. But still no heads higher up had rolled.
Each time Cassatt departed his Broad Street Station office now, he passed through a jostling crush of reporters. As the rumors of graft, illicit fortunes, and undue influence swirled around him, Cassatt seized the high ground by releasing his entire personal financial portfolio. He declared unequivocally that he held no stock—and never had since becoming president—in any coal company. Nor had he ever received “gifts” from any man or company doing business with his road. Henry Clay Frick, the PRR’s largest individual stockholder and a man once described as possessing “a hunk of iron for a heart,” came forward to say, “Mr. Cassatt is not only a very great man, but he is a very honest man…The most astonishing thing to me is that such a name and such a career should not have been enough to protect any American citizen against mere insinuation and malicious gossip.” The beleaguered Cassatt immediately wrote Frick, “I cannot adequately express my deep and grateful appreciation.” However, Cassatt admitted to one friend about the PRR, “Enough has been disclosed to show there must be a thorough housecleaning. This the Board has already undertaken in a most vigorous way.” Like Cassatt, every PRR officer and employee would now have to reveal his personal holdings.
In certain clubs there were satisfied whisperings and knowing insinuations that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s president was getting his just desserts. Had he not foolishly helped President Roosevelt push the invidious Hepburn bill, legislation that would further empower the interfering ICC? To the astonishment of the Old Guard and the jubilation of Roosevelt, the Hepburn bill and real railroad reform now looked headed for certain passage. The Wall Street Journal decried the unseemly glee over Cassatt’s woes and the “spirit of exaltation in the humiliation of the greatest railroad corporation in the country.” Still the rumors about the PRR flew and multiplied, including that of Cassatt’s imminent dismissal. This was certainly the fervent hope, wrote the (London) Times, of minority shareholders outraged “over the lavish expenditure sanctioned by Mr. Cassatt in connection with contemplated improvements.”
As the rainy dawn sky lightened on Thursday morning June 21, the 6:15 Long Island Rail Road ferry had just departed to cross the East River toward Manhattan and the Thirty-fourth Street slip. At that moment, the crew and the few passengers heard a shuddering roar, followed by the terrifying sight of a gigantic muddy geyser, spewing slime and sand, exploding out of the river ahead. They watched in awe as the huge, pulsing column of filthy water shot higher and higher, thirty, forty feet, while all around the river boiled and bubbled. The ferrymen knew exactly what it was—Tunnel D, the southernmost, had just blown again, the worst blow they’d ever witnessed. On the New York side, the ferry house men rushed to the shaft elevator cage, squeezed in, and plunged down.
Far below the boiling East River, terrified sandhogs were already stumbling wildly through the muck of the five-hundred-foot-long tunnel, racing back toward the safety of the air locks. Minutes earlier they had been installing an iron ring after making a shove. Every man there had heard through the usual din of work a sharp fearful crack, followed by a gigantic whooshing, sucking noise as the compressed air roared out and int
o the river, swirling up into the gigantic geyser. Moments later, river water gushed in through the shield, trapping and drowning a Pole, Jacob Krass, and a West Indian Negro, James Williams, who had been shoveling blasted rocks out of the facing. The river poured with fearful force into Tunnel D as the sandhogs fled. Ten terrifying minutes later, the survivors emerged filthy, soaked, mud-caked, trembling, and grateful to feel the light rain on their faces. If this were not enough corporate calamity for one day, later that morning Manhattan coroner Shrady’s jury severely censured the PRR’s East River tunnel contractors S. Pearson & Son for negligence in preventing the bends. The city’s Board of Health now vowed to supervise the tunnel works.
As the steamy heat wave lingered and the two sandhogs lay dead in flooded Tunnel D, all four of the PRR’s East River tunnels were once again at a halt. Many New York engineers now dared to say aloud what had been only spoken of sotto voce before: the PRR’s East River tunnels were defective. Specifically, “the contractors when beginning the tunnel did not sink their shaft deep enough before attempting to bore under the East River. Just what they will do to continue the work is a problem at present unsolved.” Alfred Noble and Henry Japp set about pumping out their flooded tunnel, while the sandhogs decided to form a union and strike, demanding better pay and safer conditions.
Alexander Cassatt and Samuel Rea immediately traveled to New York, just as Ernest W. Moir, vice president of S. Pearson & Son, providentially arrived from England. The torrid heat finally broke, and the ensuing rain left the air mercifully cool and fair. Reporters were invited for mollifying interviews. Rea explained that PRR engineers knew from the first that “the difficult feature of this whole work was the East River tunnels.” He revealed that not a single responsible American contractor had bid. And even S. Pearson & Son, which had built the Blackwell Tunnel under the Thames, had taken the contract only on a percentage basis. Noble was there to deny the coroner’s negligence charges, conceding only that “Occasionally a man will escape from the foreman’s vigilance and come out through the mud lock…in less time than he ought.”
Over at the Hotel Netherland on Central Park that evening, Pearson partner Moir, a jolly man with a large handlebar mustache, strode about his luxurious room with its brocaded walls, waving away all the gloom and laughing as he chatted with a reporter. “Most of the alarm about these tubes seems to have been felt by the newspapers, not by those who are doing the work.” They were, he acknowledged jovially, two months behind. He fully expected they would complete the tunnels, but declined to predict a completion date. “Everybody that knows anything about tunnel work knows that one can’t make prophecies about it. The only certainty about it is its uncertainty, so to speak. It’s not like bridge building, in which stress and strain can be calculated with mathematical accuracy. For you never know what you are going to meet under the bed of a river.” Especially under the East River, which was shaping up as the worst “he had ever seen in his tunnel building career.” Moir insisted only fourteen men had died of the bends and disputed Coroner Shrady’s charges of lax safety. “We are very careful to give the men good air…carefully analyzed all the time…We have a complete hospital work force.” As for the strike and the formation of a sandhog union, he pooh-poohed that, too.
On the same Friday Alexander Cassatt traveled to Gotham to quell the troubles engulfing the East River tunnels, William A. Patton telephoned the New York office to leave good news heard from Washington, D.C.: “the Interstate Commerce Commission has finished its work and adjourned sine die…they consider their work ended and the Commission feels that they will probably not require Mr. Glasgow’s services any further.” Patton discounted rumors reported in the newspapers of impending ICC prosecutions, writing “there is no truth in the sensational despatches from Washington, which appear in the morning papers.” In short, Patton was once again assuring Cassatt that “All is well.”
However, the venerable Sun, voice of conservative Wall Street, forecast otherwise. Its front-page headline read: “AFTER A RAILROAD PRESIDENT Roosevelt Hopes to Convict One or More.” And by Monday, the New York Times concurred, reporting in its lead story, “MAY PICK CASSATT FOR PROSECUTION Federal Lawyers Plan to Center Attack on One President.” It was a sad irony that the one railroad president who had openly supported President Roosevelt, who had actively backed government regulation, and whose railroad had taken such pride in serving the public was now the first railroad president rumored to be targeted by the ICC. The White House legal strategy was said to revolve around conspiracy charges, which “if proved will carry a penalty of imprisonment.”
Near midnight that very same Monday June 25, Charles McKim, visiting with his daughter, Margaret, his health still uncertain, was surprised to hear the telephone jangling insistently in his apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street. He picked up the receiver and a New York Times reporter breathlessly told him Stanford White had just been gunned down and killed at the rooftop theater at Madison Square Garden, White’s masterpiece. White, he said, had been sitting alone at opening night of Mamzelle Champagne. During the song, “I Could Love a Million Girls,” three shots rang out. White, in his formal dinner suit, slumped to the floor, and a pool of blood began to spread.
“My God—good God!” groaned McKim. The murderer, said the excited newsman, was Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw, who muttered as a policeman led him away, “He deserved it. I can prove it. He ruined my wife and then deserted the girl.” At first, there was just silence as McKim absorbed this horror. Then he said slowly into the receiver, “I cannot conceive of any possible ground upon which such a statement could be made.” Upon hanging up, McKim telephoned William Mead, who raced back into town. While Gotham slept, Mead had draftsmen search White’s private office hideaway at the Mohawk Building and burn all his pornographic photos.
The next day, every one of Gotham’s dozen newspapers devoted pages to this cold-blooded high-society murder and the loss of one of the nation’s greatest architects. A picture of White, the beau ideal of the gentleman-architect, was in one paper surrounded by the firm’s great works—including Penn Station. “There is hardly a city of importance in the country that does not boast at least one building designed by this firm,” wrote the New York Herald, lauding White not only as the firm’s “guiding spirit,” but as an artist larger than life: “Stanford White was known all over Europe and America as the most companionable and lovable man of his time.” McKim and Mead could not realistically hope this respectful coverage would last long.
Indeed, all of Gotham and the nation would learn in the coming days that White, a married man with a nineteen-year-old son at Harvard, had seduced Evelyn Nesbit, Thaw’s wife, when she was an unmarried showgirl of just sixteen. Now twenty-two, Nesbit was described by a World reporter as “exquisitely lovely,” having “the slim quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her faultless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the color of blue-brown pansies…a mouth made of rumpled rose petals.” Moreover, as extra editions hit the streets, far worse revelations came, with Hearst’s Journal American leading the pack: “WHITE—THE WAGES OF HIS SIN IS DEATH/ Leader in Immoral Clubs, Watched by Detectives.” Or worse yet, “WHITE’S ORGIES HELD IN TREASURE HOUSE OF ART.” In recent years, as press stories made clear, White had perfected a repellent talent for complex, and sometimes serial, seductions of young, often barely pubescent actresses. Tenderloin cabmen who knew White expressed little surprise at his murder, one saying, “But I thought that it would be a father that would do it, not a husband.” Within days, the celebrated Stanford White had been reduced in public print to a despised “voluptuary and pervert.”
Charles McKim suffered agonies to see his dear friend so reviled, and White’s son and long-suffering widow bearing the brunt of it. Moreover, McKim had the further burden of knowing that it was he who had, all those years ago, introduced, Bessie, White’s widow, to her husband. McKim’s devotion to Bessie was heartfelt and he wrote her to say that for him she had “for years made
life more worth living” and would always be “the dearest Friend I have on Earth—because the one who has taught me the most and to whom I owe the most.”
In the coming weeks, he reassured friends who wondered about his own frail health and the future of the firm that the “past month has been one of terrible strain,” but McKim, Mead & White had not been “dismasted nor demoralized, and we shall go on to the end together, whatever happens.” He arranged to take Bessie and her son away to Europe to escape the ugly aftermath of White’s murder. Of course, they all could only dread the coming trial of Harry Thaw.
As Charles McKim prepared to leave for Europe, booking adjoining staterooms and three steamer chairs on the S.S. Baltic, a besieged and exhausted Alexander Cassatt was gratefully heading north to Four Acres, his handsome seaside “cottage” in Bar Harbor for a working vacation. Once out to sea, McKim wrote his daughter, “This ship is a miracle of steadiness, cleanliness, law and order. Til today it has been hot and clammy owing to the Gulf Stream, but heavy coats, wraps and rugs are in order this morning and life once more worth living.”
When Stanford White’s murder took over the front and inside pages of every newspaper, the stories about Cassatt’s imminent prosecution disappeared, as did any further such talk. Instead, in the wake of Ida Tarbell’s scathing nineteen-part series in McClure’s titled “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which had stirred up a storm, the Roosevelt administration was preparing to prosecute John D. Rockefeller and his much-hated monopoly, Standard Oil.
TWENTY-ONE
“THE SHIELDS HAVE MET EXACTLY”
Wednesday September 12, 1906, dawned gray and wet in Manhattan. The tops of the taller skyscrapers pierced the drifting mist, while the cobblestone streets gleamed slick, full of filthy puddles as the morning commuter traffic built to a roar. By eleven o’clock, a warm drizzle was falling steadily. At the West Thirty-second Street pier abutting the New York Central’s rail yard, a throng of damp men attired in oilskin caps, oilskin tunnel coats over dark suits and ties, and sturdy rubber boots boarded two tugboats. With shrieking whistles, the boats steamed out into the Hudson. The river was choppy, pea green in the silvery light.