by Jill Jonnes
On August 8, the Cassatts’ married daughter, Mrs. W. Plunkett Stewart, had arrived at Four Acres with her small son and daughter, who both promptly fell ill with whooping cough. It was then that Cassatt, the doting grandfather, contracted it as well. His family watched in alarm as his coughs swiftly worsened. “It was so severe,” his wife, Lois, later wrote, “that I feared he might die in one of the spasms of coughing. I took the precaution of having a nurse in the house all the time, and finally got a young physician to sleep in the house as the worst spells were only in the nighttime.” By August 20, Cassatt was sufficiently recovered to wire William Patton that he was feeling much better, but that he would stay longer in Maine to fully recoup.
Cassatt was even willing to endure a visit from Edward H. Harriman, the short, bandy-legged president of the Union Pacific Railroad, who came from Boston by steamer for advice on his upcoming ICC grilling. Shifty-eyed, Harriman wore “wire-rimmed spectacles, an unkempt mustache, and a peevish expression,” writes historian Ron Chernow. “Harriman was a market operator—more a raider than a deal maker.” Cassatt believed men like Harriman inflicted pointless economic wreckage, stirring up further antirailroad antagonism. Lois wondered, as she saw the Union Pacific president depart their private dock in his steamboat, why Cassatt had not invited him to dine? “No Harriman will lunch at my house,” he answered curtly.
Each late summer day now, as part of his convalescence, Cassatt walked slowly along the piney paths to the yacht club. In the years since he had become president, his tall, strong frame had become more noticeably stooped, his blue eyes ringed by dark circles and pouches. Still debilitated from the whooping cough, Cassatt clambered carefully aboard the Scud and let his crew do most of the sailing as they trained for an end-of-season regatta. On the race day, the weather was raw and wet, the winds blustery. Cassatt insisted on piloting the Scud himself to a respectable finish. He returned home soaked, cold, and more exhausted than he liked to admit.
When the Cassatt family finally returned on September 21 to Cheswold, Cassatt was still too fatigued to return to the office. As rumors flew, the Wall Street Journal reported the PRR president would not take up “active duties at his office until he has completely recovered.” Even when Cassatt did return to Broad Street Station on October 17, the rumors persisted. A New York Times article declared that Cassatt “will go South for his health on an indefinite leave of absence.” He would, however, remain the PRR’s titular head, for “Mr. Cassatt wishes the completion of the New York terminal to be associated with his management, and he wishes to be present when it is dedicated. This done, he will step out, giving way to a man more capable physically of meeting the trying conditions.” The railroad angrily denied the story as “maliciously false.”
Yet, how did one run the nation’s greatest corporation during a prolonged convalescence? Before his illness, Cassatt’s presidential letter books brimmed with directives resolving every possible trouble. Now, the relentless inpouring of correspondence was largely referred to other PRR officers. In Gotham, the benighted East River tunnels progressed slowly, still afflicted by recurring disasters. On October 11, a bad electrical fire in Tube D killed three workmen. On November 7 and 16, there were two more fatal cave-ins, one in Tube C and one in Tube A. Then, on Sunday afternoon October 28, on the newly electrified Camden–Atlantic City line, the PRR suffered one of the worst train wrecks in its history. A three-car train careened off the rails while doing forty miles an hour. The locomotive plunged off a drawbridge into a river, condemning fifty-seven passengers to a frigid death. Most telling of all, the annual October inspection trip, when the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and his top officers steamed forth to review firsthand the state of their road, had been indefinitely postponed.
There was no shortage of financial troubles to beset the convalescing Cassatt. The PRR’s shareholders were still perennially disgruntled. “It is a commonplace of banking offices,” the Wall Street Journal explained, “that neither the success of the company’s engineers under the North River nor the heavy earnings of this year and last have restored the stock to its old place…[Investors] don’t like the idea of the company going abroad for new capital; they don’t like the expenditure of such an immense amount of money on a passenger terminal,” and so forth and so on.
Cassatt could only be grateful that these stockholders knew nothing of his greatest woe: the disastrous conundrum of the two North River tunnels. Charles Jacobs had now completed both tunnels and led triumphant underwater walks through each. But as the days shortened and winter neared, the board of engineers had yet to explain to Samuel Rea and Alexander Cassatt the deeply vexing movements of the completed tunnels. These two top officers of the Pennsylvania Railroad knew better than any what it would mean for their beloved road if the North River tunnels—the linchpin in this whole $100 million project—turned out to be defective and unusable.
As the last autumn leaves fell and morning frosts covered the lawns and meadows of Cheswold that November, Cassatt and his family moved back into Philadelphia for the winter. Their red-brick triple-wide Second Empire Revival townhouse at 202 West Rittenhouse Square was located next door to Holy Trinity Church. The Cassatt mansion, overlooking the formal Rittenhouse park with its geometric gravel paths, had handsome double bay windows at street level, a charming bowed window on the third floor, and a copper mansard roof with little dormers. Each morning, Lois watched with a pang as her once-vigorous husband, attired in a warm winter coat and wearing his high-crowned derby and gloves, climbed slowly into his carriage and set forth to drive the few blocks to his office at the train terminal.
Up in busy, chaotic Gotham, Charles McKim prepared on November 12 to send Cassatt some further Penn Station drawings showing a new “perspective of the waiting room looking towards the Seventh Avenue arcade.” McKim reported, “I arrived back from Europe a fortnight ago, feeling much better, and, in writing this letter to you, at the request of my partners, I want to express the great pleasure it gave me to learn, on landing, that the published reports in regard to your own health were without foundation.” Two days later, Cassatt replied, approving the General Waiting Room, writing, “It is going to be very fine. I am glad to hear that you have been benefitted by your trip abroad. Am glad to say that I am in much better shape.” Yet the rumors and reports of Cassatt’s ill-health persisted after Cassatt telegraphed to the secretary of the New York, New Haven & Harlem Railroad on December 5 to say he would not be able to be present at the meeting of the board of directors in New York.
On Friday December 8, Cassatt drove as usual to Broad Street Station. It was his sixty-eighth birthday and he remarked to some of the staff that no other PRR president had ever attained such an age. Two years hence, he would reach seventy and mandatory retirement. As the trains rumbled in and out of the station below, he dictated letters responding to half a dozen matters, ranging from the need for grade crossings in Buffalo, to progress on the new passenger station in Baltimore, to the Pittsburgh Coal Company’s acquisition of certain PRR lands. When he returned to Rittenhouse Square that afternoon, Cassatt acknowledged a bone-weary fatigue. He was ready to accede to both his wife’s and physician’s repeated pleas that he work from home for a time, away from the hurly-burly of the office.
And so each December morning, Cassatt’s chief clerk, O. J. De Rousse, appeared at the townhouse, as did various officers of the road, bringing correspondence, talking strategy, and pondering problems amidst the silk-damasked walls of the ground-floor rooms. PRR stock still languished, hovering in the mid $130s. The irksome business with the U.S. Post Office dragged on. The previous March, when Cassatt had sought to get the actual deed signed and monies paid, he had been astounded to learn that Postmaster General George B. Cortelyou “thinks the whole scheme is bad, the law unfortunate, and the price too high.” Believing it would “be wise to run down and have a talk with Mr. Cortelyou,” who was McKinley’s former secretary and a major Republican operative, Cassatt left the next day for the capitol.
The deed was eventually forthcoming, but now on December 14, the PRR president dictated a letter urging Samuel Rea that “A strong effort should be made at this session to have Congress appropriate $450,000 or $500,000 for the foundations and steel platforms upon which the Post Office is to be built.” Even as Cassatt grappled with all these matters, Mrs. Cassatt and a trained nurse ensured no one stayed too long. Her husband chafed at his confinement.
Christmas came and went, the weather turned cold, with snow flurries and blustery winds. On Wednesday December 26, Cassatt could not, as he had planned, personally nominate Henry Clay Frick as a director. Only his portrait, painted by John Singer Sargent, would represent him in the opulent Broad Street Station boardroom. The three-quarter portrait of the PRR president, done in 1903, showed him standing, dressed in a formal frock coat and vest (gold watch chain just visible) with a stiff high collar and cravat. Cassatt’s air was alert and vigorous, his right hand holding a paper, his left hand notched from his pant pocket. Sargent, during that whirlwind American painting tour (he had also painted the president), had captured Cassatt’s reserve, thoughtfulness, and vision. But the artist, although famous for his society portraits, had come to loathe these highly lucrative five-thousand-dollar commissions, and thus one also sensed a certain perfunctory quality to the picture.
On Friday December 28, when Cassatt’s aides came to Rittenhouse Square, the PRR president dictated a placating letter to the head of Trenton Potteries, angered by a rude porter on the New York ferryboat New Brunswick. Cassatt also signed a pro forma letter directing special arrangements for “movement of private car ‘Idle Hour’ with Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt and party from Washington to Jersey City Jan. 6th.” At mid-morning on Friday, Dr. J. H. Musser came by, the PRR men were sent away, and Lois summoned a second nurse for the night. Outside, it was still cold and gray.
Around noon, Cassatt, resting in the back upstairs bedroom, asked for his valet, Joseph. Told he was eating lunch, Cassatt said he would wait. When Joseph appeared, he helped Cassatt slowly to the bathroom and then settled him back down. Lois bustled in with their daughter, Eliza, and a wan Cassatt said he would remain in bed a bit before going downstairs again. Two of his top officers were coming for an appointment. A clock chimed one o’clock. As Cassatt lay there, he suddenly looked startled and fearful, gasping, “I feel faint.” The nurse rushed into the bedroom to administer medicine. Cassatt sighed, looked at his wife, put a hand to his heart, and closed his eyes. He was dead. When Dr. Musser appeared, he reassured Lois, distraught, tearful, that nothing could have been done for such swift heart failure.
“Word was immediately sent to Broad Street Station,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer, “and a moment later the news was radiating throughout the financial, political, railroad and social circles of the world that the master mind of the great Pennsylvania Railroad was gone.” Even as the porters at the Philadelphia station began draping black mourning crepe and many employees in the offices openly wept, “personal dispatches were at once sent to President Roosevelt, to the great bankers of New York, London and Paris, to the president of every great railroad in the United States, and to the scores of corporations with which Mr. Cassatt was directly connected.” All along the line the PRR’s thousands of locomotives would soon be draped with black, too, as they steamed over the mountain passes, rivers, and through the nation’s great midwestern and eastern cities on new tracks laid as part of Cassatt’s gigantic expansion. W. W. Atterbury ordered all flags flown at half-mast at the company’s far-flung operations until January 10.
William Patton, Cassatt’s longtime assistant and friend, raced over from Broad Street Station. All through that doleful winter afternoon, the doorbell rang again and again at the Rittenhouse Square mansion. The cream of Philadelphia society and business—among them almost all of the PRR’s directors—drew up in elegant carriages and chauffeured motorcars to leave cards expressing their condolences. Late into the evening the mourners came, as did a steady stream of uniformed Western Union and Postal Telegraph Cable boys delivering telegrams of condolence.
While Alexander Cassatt’s family and intimates knew he had heart disease, few dreamed he was on death’s door. Samuel Rea, who worked as closely with Cassatt as had anyone in the company, was far away in Pittsburgh when he heard the news. Nor was he free to return, for he was at the bedside of his ailing eighty-six-year-old mother, Ruth, at the exclusive Kenmawr Hotel. Rea wrote immediately to Lois, “The sudden passing away of Mr. Cassatt has shocked me beyond expression…I had often promised to have [the New York extension] done before he reached the retirement age. But it was not to be. He was an extraordinary man—one so noble and inspiring—I have never had so much pleasure in my life as the seven years of association with him.” Rea confided to a friend in England, “While I knew he had some heart trouble, I held the opinion that he would get better, though perhaps never entirely well, and that he would be enabled to serve out his allotted time with the Company and see the greatest of all our great improvements completed, that is the extension into and through New York.”
The sudden demise of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad was front-page news. Moreover, it was played as both a satisfying Horatio Alger story—he had started as a lowly rodman (despite his family’s wealth) and risen to the presidency. But even more dramatically, it was played as a corporate Greek tragedy. “A. J. Cassatt Dies; Of Grief, Friends Say,” wrote the New York Times, with the subhead, “Pennsylvania President’s Heart Broken by Graft Exposures.” The headline in Hearst’s Philadelphia newspaper blared, “PROMINENT FINANCIERS THINK CASSATT DIED OF BROKEN HEART.” The story went on to say that “Many men prominent in the railroad and financial worlds…unhesitatingly declare that he really died of a broken heart due to the sensational revelations made in the course of the recent coal inquiry conducted by the Interstate Commerce Commission.” J. P. Morgan partner George W. Perkins, handsome, roguish, and facing legal troubles of his own for scandals at the New York Life Insurance Company, was his usual outspoken self. Quick to laud Cassatt as “a great public servant,” he then took a satisfying swipe at government prosecutors daring to bother their corporate betters. Perkins declared that Cassatt had “died of a broken heart—a heart broken by the constant hounding of iconoclasts.”
Some friends blamed President Roosevelt for unleashing the ICC and stirring up scandal. Privately, Lois believed her husband was also still grieving for their daughter Katherine. “Her loss to us and her husband was irreparable, and I feel now that your father was never able to get over the shock of her death.”
Considering the pummeling he had taken just months earlier in the press, Cassatt would almost certainly have been gratified to read his glowing obituaries, the ensuing editorials, and the many letters of condolence. William McAdoo, whose own visionary Hudson River tunnel system had been possible only because of Cassatt’s magnanimous views of public service, wrote, “He was not only one of the great men of the day, but he was the only railroad statesman this country has ever produced.”
Cassatt’s worldview that pure laissez-faire capitalism was detrimental to the nation had put him at loggerheads with his fellow Gilded Age railroad potentates. The deceased PRR president, noted the New York Times in an editorial, “was among the first [and]…certainly was the most prominent and powerful of the railroad men who…advocated a cordial co-operation [with government]” Cassatt was also unique, the Times said, for practicing “the doctrine that the true policy of a public service corporation was to deal candidly, fairly, and honorably with the public.” And what, wondered the more embittered of his family and friends, had he and the PRR gotten for these enlightened views?
Monday December 31, 1906, was cold and dreary, with a steady drizzle creating a fitting atmosphere for the funeral obsequies at the Cassatt mansion. Across the street in Rittenhouse Square Park, beneath the dripping winter trees, hundreds of curious onlookers jostled under umbrellas, craning and hoping for a glimpse of the nation’s rich and powerful. Po
licemen stood uneasy guard at the mansion’s front entrance, elaborately draped in black crepe, keeping a wary eye out for troublemakers and bomb-throwing anarchists. At noon, the mourners began to appear, led by a delegation of Pennsylvania Railroad employees. The men removed their derbies as they passed within to the solemn hush of the front parlor, furnished in antiques, oriental rugs, and modern paintings. They nodded and murmured their condolences to William Patton and Cassatt’s two grown sons, Robert and Edward, all seated at the head of the open black wooden casket. Once again, a PRR president had died in office. Delegations from the railroad’s rank and file and every top Pennsy officer passed through to murmur their respects. Samuel Rea was still in Pittsburgh with his sick mother.
When the men reminisced about their boss, they shared one especially famous Cassatt story. The PRR president had boarded the morning local as usual at Haverford Station on the Main Line for his commute into Philadelphia. When the train came to an unscheduled stop, Cassatt noticed that the trainman, one he did not recognize, was not, as company rules dictated, standing behind the train waving a red flag. Instead, he was lounging on the train’s back platform. Cassatt opened the back door and inquired quietly if this was proper procedure? Obviously unaware who the well-dressed Cassatt was, the trainman squirted forth a great stream of tobacco juice and replied, “I don’t know if it is any damned business of yours.” Cassatt, taken aback, responded, “Certainly not, certainly not,” and retreated to his seat. Once in his office at Broad Street Station, Cassatt summoned the trainmaster, who swore he would immediately fire the lounger. “No, you won’t fire him,” Cassatt said. “But tell him not to be so disrespectful to people who ask for information in the future.”
Cassatt was always popular with his officers, who had a whole song they liked to sing at get-togethers (to the popular Irish air, “Tessie—You Are the Only, Only, Only”) that had a final lyric: