20 Seeking Relief

Any biography of Mr Harriman which omits his family life misses the point and loses the light of the whole story … It was not unusual for him, in the midst of transactions of such importance as to make men dizzy from concentration, to stop in order to speak a word on the telephone, or send a message to Mrs Harriman about some engagement or matter of family interest. His attitude toward her was more than devotion. It was profound admiration, respect and unfailing attention and courtesy. Many times through the years business was interrupted or preceded by an order for flowers in commemoration of some anniversary. And as for the children, their education and welfare came before everything. Absolutely nothing was allowed to interfere with a visit to their schools, or the prosecution of any investigation or enterprise affecting their training or welfare.

—Judge Robert S. Lovett, letter to George Kennan

The more prominent Harriman became, the harder it was for him to live anything resembling a normal life. The upper class had always lived in a world apart, but American culture was undergoing a profound change by the 1880s. Industrialization had swollen the ranks of the wealthy and near wealthy just as immigration had increased the legion of the poor. There emerged a new material civilization in which business figures replaced politicians and soldiers as national heroes. The proliferation of cheap urban dailies fostered this process by splashing the exploits of tycoons across their pages and titillating readers with accounts of the lifestyles of the rich. By 1900 the yellow press had turned business titans and denizens of society alike into an early form of celebrity.

In this sense Harriman could measure his prominence by the growing amount of space he got in print. Some reporters made careers out of hounding the wealthy and depicting their antics in ways that were more vivid than accurate. The effect was to make the lives of the rich more accessible to the public while transforming their usual insularity into a siege mentality. For Harriman this posed a special problem. He had always belonged to the best social set, yet he also saw to it that his family shunned the worst excesses of the rich.

The Harrimans were a breed apart among a class apart. While denying their children none of life’s pleasures, they were determined to imprint them with a sense of values and responsibility that could not be corrupted by their more feckless friends. This zeal made Harriman a domineering father and Mary a strict, demanding mother. It also placed a heavy burden on the children to measure up to the high standards expected of them. “Papa does want his children to be something & make something of themselves,” Cornelia once lamented to her sister Mary. “He said that he started out wanting us to be different from other children & that’s the reason we have been brought up so differently.”¹

The children staggered under the load, but none reared into rebellion. Young Mary, who was her father’s favorite, came the closest. “I was ever so glad to get your letter,” she repented to her father after one spat, “because it just set things straight and showed me how foolishly I had been acting. But besides being very ‘babyish,’ I think I have been selfish, and thinking only of my own pleasure and not doing my share a bit.”²

Harriman prodded the children into reaching beyond what they thought themselves capable of doing. He expected of them the same perfectionist standards he demanded of himself and would not tolerate lack of effort or dishonesty. Averell learned this the hard way when he coaxed the chauffeur into letting him take his father’s Mercedes out for a drive without first getting permission. Averell wrecked the clutch and had to confess his deed. “My father gave me quite unshaded hell,” he recounted later. What bothered Henry most was that Averell had done it on the sly. “I’m straight with you,” he admonished. “I expect you to be straight with me.”³

Most of the Harrimans’ friends commented glowingly on the closeness of their family life. What made it so remarkable was the way Harriman included his family in his business activities. His knack for mixing business and pleasure revealed the extent to which he found relief at home from the pressures of work. Yet family was also for him another form of business, one filled with joy and pleasure but no less demanding in the responsibilities it placed on him. Relief came hard for Harriman because he was always at work in whatever he did. The triumph of his life lay in learning not to escape this pressure but to thrive on it.

When the new century opened, Harriman was nearly fifty-two and the undisputed patriarch of his clan. His parents had long since died, and his eldest brother, John, followed them in 1898. Mary had lost her father in 1897, leaving her brother William more dependent than ever on Harriman for financial counsel. Another painful loss came in 1903 with the death of Harriman’s youngest brother, William, who succumbed to Bright’s disease. His loss touched Henry deeply; he had been closer to Willie than to any of his brothers and devoted to him during his long illness.⁴

Unlike his brothers, Willie never married. He became a club man and collector of art who loved sailing on his yacht, traveling, and hosting entertainments. As declining health forced him to surrender these pleasures, Henry tried to fill the vacuum. Whenever Willie fell ill, as he did late in 1892, Henry arranged for his care, providing a private car for him to travel south in the care of one of the family doctors. “I appreciate all the trouble you took then and all that you showed & did all thro my illness,” wrote a grateful Willie as soon as he was able to grasp a pencil again.⁵

Willie’s condition worsened in November 1902, and Henry sent him to Florida in Dr. Lyle’s care. Late in February, hearing that Willie was failing, he rushed south despite being in the middle of negotiations with Hill. When Willie’s condition seemed hopeless, Henry brought him back to New York to spend his last days among the family. A preferred way of handling illness or death among wealthy families in those days was to check the patient into a hotel rather than a hospital and arrange for treatment or care there. Willie was installed at the Plaza Hotel, where he died on April 4.⁶

Willie’s passing cut Henry’s last direct tie to his old firm, Harriman & Company. The house still had two of his cousins, Oliver Harriman Jr. and J. Borden Harriman, both sons of the uncle Oliver who had helped Henry buy his first seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and a nephew. By 1903, however, Henry had more than enough to occupy him elsewhere. He continued to favor his old firm, but his interest in it waned after Willie’s death.

Harriman barely had time to mourn Willie’s loss before heading west on an extended trip to inspect the railroad and deal with the shopmen’s strike on the Union Pacific. Young Mary was the only family member who accompanied him. In mid-May Harriman finished his business in California and started east. He was on a tight schedule; the family was to sail for Europe at the month’s end. As the train pulled out of Ogden, Harriman’seemed in good spirits. He chatted with W. L. Park before going to bed around eleven o’clock. Half an hour later, Park was surprised to see Harriman’s secretary, W. A. Ransom, rushing into his car. Mr. Harriman was ill, Ransom exclaimed, and needed a doctor at once.⁷

Park stopped the train and wired ahead for a doctor at the hospital in Evanston, Wyoming, less than an hour away. The doctor climbed aboard when the train arrived, but Park took no chances. He wired the company surgeon to meet the train in Cheyenne and also ordered the chief surgeon to hurry west on the next train. The doctors examined Harriman and agreed on their diagnosis: appendicitis. Everyone was in a state of near panic. The most important railroad man in the country lay ill in the middle of Wyoming with a condition that in 1903 was anything but routine. The surgery required was dangerous, and where was it to be performed?

An alarmed Park had to leave the train at Cheyenne. He stopped by Harri-man’s stateroom to say good-bye and found him sitting up in bed shaving himself. “These doctors of yours say I have appendicitis,” Harriman growled. “They are mistaken. I am going to be all right soon.” He had no intention of canceling the meetings he had scheduled with leaders of the shopmen’s unions in Omaha. Park shook his head in amazement and reluctantly took his leave.⁸

The squire at rest: E. H. Harriman in 1906, caught in a rare moment of relaxation.

Fortunately, Harriman had ordered Samuel Felton to meet the train at Cheyenne. Climbing aboard the Arden, he found a strikingly different Harriman: pale and drawn, his gaunt face wreathed with pain. “I am very sick,” Harriman groaned in what was a startling confession from a man who never betrayed weakness. “I do not know what is the matter with me,” he lied, “and the company doctor with me doesn’t know, either.”⁹

“Then of course you are going right through to New York,” Felton ventured.

“Yes, I am going right through,” Harriman replied. “But I have to meet a delegation of shopmen at Omaha. They wrote asking to see me, and I promised to see them.” He brushed aside Felton’s protest that the situation did not require the presence of a sick man. “Yes, I know all that,” he snapped, “but I promised to see them, and I am going to see them.”

Felton knew this obstinate streak of Harriman’s all too well and did not waste any more words. Instead, he hurried off to consult the company’s chief surgeon, who informed him of Harriman’s ailment. The situation was both delicate and dangerous. No one knew how serious the inflammation was or how much time Harriman had before a crisis. Felton decided to take no chances. When the train reached Omaha, he hunted up the station master and countermanded the order to attach another car for the union delegates who were to accompany Harriman to Chicago. The delegates were told that Harriman was ill, and they offered no objections to postponing the meeting.

Another physician climbed aboard at Omaha and confirmed the diagnosis. When the train chugged out of that city, Felton heaved a sigh of relief and went reluctantly to tell Harriman what he had done. “Why did you interfere with my plans?” Harriman rasped peevishly.

“To save your life,” Felton answered.

Harriman was not impressed. “What you have done,” he said, “just means that I shall have to see them at Chicago. I said I would see them, and I am going to see them. Wire them to come on to Chicago.”

Felton nodded wearily but ignored the order. Instead, he arranged for a top surgeon to meet the train in Chicago. When the doctor entered his stateroom, Harriman’started up again about meeting the union delegates before doing anything else. The surgeon nodded impassively and proceeded to examine him. When he had finished, he said in a grave voice, “Mr. Harriman, you have appendicitis. You will go to my hospital at once and be operated on, or you will attach your car to the next train for New York and be operated on there.”¹⁰

No longer able to deny his condition, Harriman allowed his car to be hitched onto a New York Central train for the trip home. By then the papers had got hold of the story and were spreading it rapidly despite Feltons attempt to downplay its seriousness. On Wall Street bears used the rumors to hammer the Harriman’stocks. “With the exception of J. Pierpont Morgan,” wrote one pundit, “there is no man … whose death would have a more depressing effect upon a large number of prominent stocks.”¹¹

When the train reached New York on the morning of May 16, Harriman had to be whisked to a suite in the Netherland Hotel because his house was under quarantine. During his absence Cornelia and Roland had come down with scarlet fever and were confined to the house with Averell, Carol, and their mother, leaving only young Mary to stay with her father. Doctors Lyle and Morris met him at the station, where Harriman made a brave show of denial to reporters while being eased into an automobile for the trip to the hotel.¹²

It was all bluff. Three days later a special platform was set up in the hotel suite, and Dr. William T. Bull performed the operation with half a dozen colleagues at his elbow. The surgery went smoothly, and once Harriman came out of the ether, he relished nothing more than telegraphing Hill that the doctor “took out the useless thing this morning. I am in fine shape.” For years afterward he kept up a pretense of being angry with Felton for interfering with his plans, then finally wrote him a letter of appreciation.¹³

During his recovery he was surprised by a visit from John Muir, who happened to be in New York. “You must have suffered terribly,” Muir sympathized, but Harriman ignored the remark and talked instead of his record dash across the continent. “Troubles seldom come singly,” he added abruptly. “Now we are getting out of them all—strikes on the roads, scarlet fever in the family, etc.—and for the first time since these troubles commenced we are going to dine together this evening in my room. Join us and you will see all the family.”¹⁴

Nothing made Harriman happier than to be reunited with his family and to share the moment with a friend. Muir could not accept, but he came away deeply impressed by what he called the finest “domestic weather” he had ever experienced. It was a warm, pervasive atmosphere that embraced all who fell under its spell and made them part of whatever the family happened to be doing at the time. For a time they became willing conscripts to whatever program Harriman had mapped out, and always it was he who called the tune they danced.

But the weather was not always fair. There were the inevitable tiffs and disagreements as well as the crises born of illness or injury. The pain Harriman endured from his own illness was nothing compared to his suffering when one of the children was afflicted. It was the one time he felt utterly helpless, unable to control his destiny. When Cornelia had to be operated on for appendicitis, Harriman could only ask the minister at Arden to say a prayer for her recovery. The children got hurt often because they led such vigorous lives and their father had taught them to be plucky. Young Mary once found herself astride a wildly bucking horse but kept her composure and escaped with only a sore ankle. Later she would not be so lucky; her death in 1934 came from injuries suffered when her horse fell and rolled over her.¹⁵

To Harriman, the risks of vigorous activity were simply the price of doing life’s business, and he drilled this attitude into the children. He gave them every means for improving themselves and expected them to take full advantage of their opportunities. All were sent to private schools; Roland went to one in Lakewood, New Jersey, with only six other students. Harriman often brought the family down in an automobile to visit him and once took all the students with them to Atlantic City for the night. They strolled the boardwalk, ate cotton candy, and posed for a family picture with Henry’s head perched atop the cutout of a Teddy bear.¹⁶

The boys were congenial but awkward, eager to please and to learn because their father would have it no other way. Harriman’saw that their schools had everything they needed. He believed so strongly in physical fitness that he had a bar attached to the bedroom roof of his railway car for chinning exercises. When Averell started at Groton in 1903, the school had no athletic director until Harriman helped defray the cost of one. Roland moved to Groton at eleven, a year younger than most of the boys, and struggled so badly that the headmaster suggested he repeat a year. Harriman had a better idea: he furnished the school with a tutor to help boys like Roland.¹⁷

Despite his frantic schedule, Harriman watched the boys’ progress like a hawk. The school required them to write home on Sundays; the Harrimans demanded a postcard from each boy every night. Grades went home once a week and were scanned like financial reports. No one was punished outright for poor performance, but the somber mood in the house when they came home on holiday made clear how they stood in their parents’ eyes. Yet not even frowns of disapproval could spoil the evening fun, when their competitive juices flowed out in games of dominoes, Parcheesi, or backgammon.¹⁸

When the boys showed an interest in rowing, Harriman took his yacht the Sultana up the Hudson to Poughkeepsie, where several college crews were training for a race. Although he knew nothing about rowing, he watched the crews work out, talked to the coaches, jotted down notes on their performance, and collected enough information to conclude that the best coach was Jim Ten Eyck of Syracuse. Ten Eyck was promptly invited to spend six weeks at Arden, where each day on Forest Lake he drilled the boys until they became good oarsmen.¹⁹

Although most children of the elite did some traveling, few could match the Harrimans. By the time Roland was twelve, he had visited every state except Alabama and North Dakota along with Alaska, Siberia, Canada, Japan, China, Manchuria, much of Europe, and Mexico. In the United States they traveled by automobile before it became popular, enduring breakdowns, rugged terrain, and the taunts of bystanders shouting “Get a horse!” One summer Harriman piled the boys into a car and drove across the wilds of central Oregon, the first man to make the trip by car, so he could scout firsthand the prospects for a railroad line.²⁰

Other trips were more tame but always with a purpose. One Sunday morning Harriman decided the time had come for the boys to see the rectory on Long Island where he had been born. The chauffeur drove them out to Hempstead, where they poked around the house in which the Reverend Orlando Harriman had lived. When they returned home, Mary asked if the boys liked the old homestead. “Well,” shrugged Harriman with obvious disappointment, “the only one who was impressed was the chauffeur.”²¹

Harriman expected no less of his daughters than of his sons. They too were educated in private schools and pushed to go as far as their abilities would take them. Mary blazed an impressive trail for the others to follow. She went to Barnard College, majored in biology and sociology, and developed an interest in eugenics that earned her the nickname “Eugenia” from classmates. She passed this interest along to her mother, who found herself in the unexpected role of sometimes having to restrain young Marys enthusiasm for causes.²²

In society no less than in education Mary veered from the usual path. A dark, pleasant girl with an infectious laugh, she liked to dance and enjoy the company of her friends. But when the time came for her debut in 1901, she balked at what she deemed a wasteful expense. Drawing together eighty other debutantes, she persuaded them to form a new organization that could be both fun and useful to the needy. Her zeal led to the founding of the Junior League.

Mary worshiped her father and was the child most like him. She was the most strong-willed and assertive, the most effervescent in personality, and the one most likely to challenge his authority. When they clashed over the issue of marriage, however, it was Mary who bowed in dutiful retreat. During the family’s swing through the Far East, Mary fell under the spell of Willard Straight. Then stationed in Seoul, a vice-consul nursing grand ambitions in a backwater post, Straight was at twenty-five nearly two years older than Mary. Tall, charming, possessed of boyish good looks and brimming with talent, he had a bright, witty mind and a clever tongue. He wrote and drew well and had graduated from Cornell as an architect in 1901. He took a post with the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in China, then served as a Reuters correspondent in Korea during the Russo-Japanese War.²³

The move to the legation at Seoul was the latest stop in Straight’s search for his destiny. The Far East had fascinated him since a stay in Tokyo as a child, but it was not his only obsession. During these years Straight brooded endlessly over the contradictions in his life and ambitions. Both his parents had been schoolteachers who died early, leaving Willard and his sister Hazel to be raised by two woman friends of their mother. Willard’s increasing contact with the elite aroused in him a fierce desire to join them and a painful awareness of how unlike them he was. He was not only poor; he was an artist, with an artists temperament and sensitivity. His character was made of porcelain, theirs of marble- dense, polished, and solid. In October 1904 he poured out his doubts to his diary: “This playing with the Great is unsatisfactory. I am not of them. For the present by position and in virtue of money enough to dress well I am able to trot in their class. The celerity with which they would drop me should I make a mistake or appear in an old suit of clothes would be remarkable. Imagine going through life as an artist, a little brother to the Rich. Dawdling at Newport trying to catch orders. Painting portraits and being petted … a hanger on—a tail of a retinue. It is all wrong. One receives more than one can give.”²⁴

At the same time, Straight longed desperately to be “of them.” He set his sights on capturing an heiress, and he had excellent if unorthodox tools with which to work. It was his blend of charm and artistic bent that captivated Mary. The company of her society chums amused but never fulfilled her. Men like Bertie Goelet were pleasant and charming but could not match Straight’s creative volatility, yearning ambition, and restless energy. There was a magnetism about him, a sense that he not only had a soul of more than ordinary depth but also wore it close to the surface.

During their brief time together, Mary fell in love with him. When Straight returned home in 1906 to attend the wedding of Alice Roosevelt and Nicholas Longworth, he saw Mary again. A romance between them bloomed before Straight went off to Cuba with the Longworths. That summer he returned to the United States and managed to secure an appointment as consul general to Mukden. Although his diary fell mysteriously silent during these months, there is no doubt he visited the Harrimans. Edwin Morgan, who had headed the legation in Seoul, thought it was Harriman’s influence that got Straight his posting to Mukden.²⁵

Harriman helped get Straight appointed because he had plans for the young diplomat. The vision of a global transportation system still danced in his brain. To keep it alive, he needed someone in the Far East who could keep him posted on the shifting scene there. Straight was eager to play this role; he viewed himself as a spearhead of American influence in Manchuria and China, opening a wedge for economic penetration by men of Harriman’s caliber.²⁶

Although Harriman did not know it, Straight also wanted something from him. Before his departure in October, he and Mary talked of marriage despite the enormous social and geographical gulf between them. They agreed to be engaged secretly, knowing that Harriman would be furious if he knew. Straight departed with a sense of relief, leaving Mary with the delicate task of how and when to tell her father. She was close to her father and the nearest thing to a free spirit in the family, yet the matter went unbroached for months.²⁷

Meanwhile, Straight fed a steady stream of information to Harriman on the Manchurian and Siberian Railway, the political climate, investment opportunities, and other matters. While Harriman pondered these reports, Mary groped for an opening to present her own agenda. The only ones who knew her secret were Cornelia Harriman and Straight’s sister Hazel. It did not help that her father had fallen into a bitter controversy with his old friend Teddy Roosevelt and come under attack by the ICC. Finally, in April 1907, she screwed up her courage and broke the news to him. “I don’t quite know if he has recovered from the ‘shock’ of what I have told him,” she sighed to a close friend afterward, “but now it is a question of waiting for Willard to be able to get leave.”²⁸

The shock waves were not long in coming. Harriman was livid not only over the engagement but also because it had been kept secret from him. Cornelia tried to intervene on her sister’s behalf and received the same tongue-lashing for being deceitful. “I don’t think we’re such despicable creatures as Papa made out us to be,” she wailed. The trouble with Mary, Harriman told Cornelia pointedly, was that she insisted on making things so hard for herself. He also had serious reservations about Straight. If anything, Harriman noted harshly, he was too much like Mary—lacking in balance and stability. Harriman doubted he was as capable as Mary thought he was and doubted his sincerity even more. Was he after Mary or an heiress? Harriman conceded that he did not know Straight well, but that was the point: neither did Mary. She had been swept off her feet by a man she had seen only briefly and did not really know.²⁹

Mary retreated in hurt and confusion. She talked of going to Mukden while her father remained implacable. Cornelia tried to help but confessed helplessly, “I feel so torn between you & Papa.” The crisis remained private until one morning early in August when a reporter turned up at Arden asking to interview Mary, who happened to be the only one of the family there. Harriman had just taken the boys west on an inspection trip, and his wife had gone out with the other girls on the Sultana. Was it true, asked the reporter bluntly, that Mary was going to marry Willard Straight?³⁰

Mary was aghast and could only blurt out a denial. “I don’t know what to do about it,” she cried frantically to a confidant. “I am terribly worried. How can they possibly have heard a rumour—& if any-thing comes out in the paper about it—Papa will be simply furious & it will make every-thing ten times worse. It is too dreadful.” The story did appear, embellished with the juicy morsel that the couple had been secretly engaged for nearly a year. To the reporters chasing after him for his reaction, Harriman declared in steely tones that there had never been an engagement and would never be a marriage.³¹

The once and future engagement died aborning after this incident. Straight remained Harrimans contact in the Far East but had to seek his heiress elsewhere. He managed this with spectacular success, marrying Dorothy Whitney in 1911. Mary could not bear to be alienated from her father and hurried back into his good graces, but the rebel in her did not die. Social gossips soon paired her with Bertie Goelet, the son of Harrimans old Illinois Central friend and heir to one of the largest fortunes in America. Goelet was a pleasant specie of social butterfly—handsome, charming, utterly devoted to the ritual pleasures of those who fluttered between New York and Newport. In school he had written essays on such burning topics as “The Supposed Degeneracy of the Modern Racehorse.”³²

To society’s eyes the match seemed a perfect one. Bertie ran in the same set as Mary, if far more vigorously, and his family had a place at Tuxedo conveniently near Arden. But Mary surprised society again by choosing Charles C. Rumsey, a sculptor from an old Buffalo family of modest means. Rumsey was the very creature Straight had dreaded becoming: the artist tied to society’s tail. An excellent horseman and polo player, he met Mary at the Meadowbrook Club on Long Island, where they often rode together in hunts.³³

“Pad” Rumsey did not fit Harriman’s strict criteria for a son-in-law any better than Straight, but Mary had learned from experience. She did not marry Rumsey until eight months after her father’s death. The only one of the girls to marry in Harriman’s lifetime was Cornelia, who walked the straight and narrow by accepting Robert L. Gerry, the scion of a distinguished family that traced its lineage back to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Their wedding at Grace Church in March 1908 was the lavish ceremony Mary never had, in which Harriman proudly gave his daughter away amid an overflow crowd of old friends and the social elite.³⁴

On those rare occasions when Harriman found himself alone at Arden, he was quick to take refuge from his solitude in the company of friends or the disciplining of servants gone slack in their duties. His restlessness was as great as his need for his family, the “chicks” as he liked to call the children no matter how grown they were. He was incapable of sitting still or dwelling in the company of his thoughts except when working out business plans. The squire of Arden was always on duty even though he was seldom needed because Mary ran the household so efficiently.

Such was the case one sultry July day in 1906 when Mary and the children had gone off to Long Island, leaving Henry alone in New York awaiting a trip west. “I can see the cavalcade raising the dust for all Southampton,” he teased Mary after wiring her a birthday present. He had spent a night at Arden during the week and had not liked what he found. The housekeeper was away; in her absence several boxes of berries had spoiled because no orders had been given about them. Harriman directed the gardener to start a ledger listing every item sent up to the house and ordered the cook to sign her name on receipt. Now he asked Mary to instruct the housekeeper “to stop the waste & carry out my new plan.”³⁵

At least the cook had shown good sense in not wasting a whole chicken on his solitary dinner, and the parts she served had been tasty. After dinner Ned Parrott stopped by to chat for a couple of hours. His father was dying, and Ned could only wait helplessly. “I feel very sorry for Ned,” mourned Harriman. “The rest of them are cold.” Another old friend, Rensselaer Weston, also ambled in to say hello. Their presence cheered Harriman only briefly. He felt adrift without someone from the family, and his only companion on the forthcoming trip was to be the lawyer Charles Peabody.³⁶

Above all he missed Mary and her quiet, supportive dignity. Harriman understood that her formal manner masked a shyness that made her soft-spoken even at the dinner table. She never competed with Harriman but made her wishes known when it counted. Society held little appeal for her; she dressed well but simply and had no desire to compete with the likes of Mamie Fish, whose social excesses were fast driving her husband to despair. Mary possessed a strong will and an even stronger loyalty to family, and she knew how to laugh.³⁷

She was the ideal companion for a man who had always to command. Together with the children, she provided Harriman release from his duties as squire of Arden and Napoleon of the railways. Despite their occasional spats and tribulations, the family was never happier than when together. So important had Arden become as their haven from the outside world that in 1905 Harriman determined to build a new and far more ambitious house there. The squire wanted a castle set atop a mountain in splendid isolation, with breathtaking views across his domain in every direction.

But not a castle. Harriman wanted something palatial but with a unique twist: it was to be an American home, built entirely with native granite and other materials, designed by an American architect, constructed by his own workmen, and furnished with American art and artifacts. He selected a choice site atop one of the highest ridges in the Ramapo Hills even though everything used in the work had to be hoisted twenty-three hundred feet up on a private cable railway built for the project. This meant slow going and rugged handling, but that was fine with Harriman. Indeed, it was altogether fitting. Everything else in his life had been an uphill climb; why should his dream house be any different?