THREE

“THE ABLEST MAN THIS RAILWAY EVER PRODUCED”

On December 7, 1881, Katharine Cassatt sat in the soft gray Paris light flooding the family’s top-floor apartment near Place Pigalle at 13, avenue Trudaine, finishing up a letter to her older son. She wanted Aleck to retire. In an earlier letter she had inquired, “How do you manage with Roberts as chief? I think you didn’t like the idea of serving under him.” Her long dark hair elegantly twisted up, she adjusted her wire-rimmed pince-nez, then dipped her pen in the ink and finished her missive, “Don’t put off resigning too long—remember the fate of your predecessor.” In fact more than one top officer of the Pennsylvania Railroad had died from sheer overwork.

Robert and Katherine Cassatt, Alexander’s parents, had settled in Belle Epoque Paris four years earlier to make a home for his younger sister, Mary, a serious artist, and his older sister, Lydia, invalided by Bright’s disease. The Paris branch of the family encouraged Aleck to collect, buying him paintings by Monet, Pissarro, and Mary’s friend Degas. “When you get these pictures you will probably be the only person in Philada. who owns specimens of either of the masters,” crowed his father. “If exhibited at any of your Fine Art Shows they will be sure to attract attention.”

When Cassatt, forty-two, retired in September of 1882, his bland resignation letter insisted he wanted only “to have more time at my disposal than anyone occupying so responsible a position in railroad management can command.” Cassatt could well afford to retire for he was a self-made millionaire. Within weeks the Cassatts had boarded the Servia (“the worst old roller on the sea”) and endured a storm-tossed passage en route to Paris. With their children in school, Cassatt and his wife, Lois, traveled down to Rome to see the Forum, the Colosseum, and the cavernous Baths of Caracalla. Back in Paris, Aleck enjoyed horse rides in the Bois de Boulogne and sat at great length for yet another portrait by his sister.

As ambitious and strong-willed as her engineer brother, Mary Cassatt had been a conventional painter of academic genre portraits when, in 1877, she saw the work of Edgar Degas. “It changed my life,” she would write later. “I saw art then as I wanted to see it.” Mary boldly aligned herself with the Impressionists, becoming the one American to exhibit with them. Lois Cassatt, a society figure, never warmed up to Mary, complaining in an 1880 letter, “The truth is I cannot abide Mary & never will—I can’t tell why but there is something to me so utterly obnoxious about that girl…She is too self important, & I cannot put up with it.”

By late spring the Cassatts were sailing home so Alexander could run his new stock farm, Chesterbrook, a six-hundred-acre pastoral universe in Berwyn of prize sheep, Berkshire pigs, Guernsey cattle, and above all, his championship racehorses. When asked why he had retired, Cassatt replied, “Had to do it. The farm needed me.”

For two decades now Alexander Cassatt’s life had straddled two very different worlds. In his work, he had been the master of the heavily mechanized, gritty, commerce-centered railroad industry. The state of Pennsylvania was an industrial powerhouse, while Philadelphia, the state’s chief port, was home to the Baldwin Locomotive Company, world leader in locomotive and streetcar production, and William Cramp and Sons, dominant in steamships. But the city and the state’s crowning industrial glory was the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In the warmer months, when Alexander Cassatt left this high-powered industrial world at the end of each workday, he commuted westward on his road’s Main Line to Haverford. At his bucolic demesne, Cheswold, and at the far larger Chesterbrook (with its half-mile track), Cassatt was a passionate gentleman farmer and horse-besotted country squire, an avid breeder and trainer. President of the Radnor Hunt, handsome in riding jacket, jodhpurs, and tall shiny boots, Cassatt hurtled over the hedges atop his favorite steed, Fanny, a Percheron mix. At Cassatt’s tongue-in-cheek Farmer’s Club Dinners, the guests ate with tiny hoes and shovels while chickens and ducks wandered about.

Alexander Cassatt riding at Cheswold, his Main Line Haverford estate.

By mid-September of 1883, the Pennsylvania Railroad had lured Alexander Cassatt back onto its board of directors, and it was from there, as “director of roads,” Cassatt first led his company’s obsessive quest to enter Manhattan. As one PRR officer said of that time, “We listened to any scheme to get into New York.” Otherwise, Cassatt satisfied his love of railroads and technical challenges by building a small line to Virginia known as the “Berry Express” to swiftly haul fresh fruits and vegetables from southern farms to northern tables. In between lapped thirty-six miles of choppy Chesapeake Bay. Cassatt surmounted this watery obstacle by designing powerful transfer tugs to whisk trains across the waves.

While Cassatt was a diligent member of the PRR board, by and large, as one journalist wrote, “For seventeen years this big, brainy man endeavored to find satisfaction in European travel, in books and in the organization of a great horse-breeding farm at Berwyn, Pennsylvania, where he reared famous champions of the turf.” Cassatt relished the scheming and drama of horse racing. “Seagram’s…only win at Brooklyn,” he wrote in early 1894, “was one of [the] most extraordinary flukes ever seen on a race course, and he was an exceedingly nasty horse.” Over in Paris, his family followed his exploits with high-spirited glee. Wrote Mary, “Mother seizes the paper the minute it arrives & wont give it up until she has read all about your horses,” and then later, “On Tuesday evening the paper containing the news of the ‘Bard’s’ victories reached us…we all congratulate you.” When the New Jersey racing scene went crooked, Cassatt took to breeding hackney carriage horses with the same passion.

In 1888, Alexander Cassatt had purchased a handsome townhouse-mansion at 202 West Rittenhouse Square with a picture gallery in the rear, so his wife and daughters could better lead Philadelphia society. One winter the family toured Egypt, awed by ancient wonders. Cassatt bought a yacht, the Enterprise (reportedly for more than $500,000), “elaborately fitted,” its salon “furnished in bird’s eye maple and walnut with a frescoed ceiling.” The years slipped pleasantly past for this devoted paterfamilias, though his health, despite his outdoor life and athleticism, was not perfect as he ended his fifth decade. He suffered a mild heart attack in 1897. By Christmas, Lois wrote one of their daughters, “I am glad to say he seems on the mend now. He has just walked around the square once. Dr. Sinkler gave him some capsules which seem to act like a charm.”

 

When PRR President George Roberts died of a heart attack in his Bala Cynwyd estate in 1897, his greatest accomplishment was the completion of Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station, a red-brick and terra-cotta Moorish-Gothic castle. The station brought sixteen tracks right into the city’s heart, a feat made possible only by building a “massive elevated stone causeway…cutting the city in two between Market and Arch.” It was called the “Chinese Wall.” The PRR’s corporate offices occupied the station’s second floor and looked out at Philadelphia’s rococo City Hall, a French Second Empire granite and marble pile thirty years (and many corrupt contracts) in the making. On the other side of City Hall was the terminal of the Reading Railroad, a major coal road seemingly always in receivership.

In the wake of Roberts’s death, vice president Frank Thomson, a friend of Cassatt, took over. He was a solid choice, but as the New York Journal American, not known to mince words, commented, “He is by no means a genius.” And indeed, Thomson found the railroad’s problems crushing. The American economy had finally recovered and now the fast-rising tide of Pennsylvania’s industrial output—whether Carnegie steel, Frick coke, or Westinghouse products—swamped the PRR. Pittsburgh was a filthy Vesuvius of roaring capitalism, its putrid black sky proof of its “first place in the world’s production of iron, steel, tin-plate, iron and steel pipes, steel cars, air-brakes, electrical machinery, brass, coal and coke, fire-brick, plate-glass, window-glass, tumblers, tableware, petroleum, pickles, white lead, and cork…It originates a tonnage of freight nearly five times as great as that of either New York or London; and greater than that of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia combined.”

The PRR’s Philadelphia Broad Street Station. Note half-built City Hall tower.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was overwhelmed. And yet even as it suffered from a shortage of cars and congested tracks, it was finding itself blackmailed into giving secret and illegal rebates to its most important customers. These extorted discounts enfeebled all the nation’s railroads and left smaller merchants, shippers, and farmers paying unfair higher rates for freight. The Pennsylvania’s conservative board of directors (of which Cassatt had long been a restless member) bemoaned that “disaster was imminent…none but the strongest and best equipped lines could earn a profit.” The PRR was earning, to its deep dismay, the lowest ton-mile rate in its history.

Between the avalanche of industrial wealth and the intractable evil of secret rebates, Thomson lasted but two years, dying suddenly in mid-1899 at age fifty-eight. Yet another PRR president had died in office.

And so on a lovely day, June 8, 1899, shortly after Thomson’s death, a sober-suited delegation from the railroad’s board journeyed out on their Main Line to Haverford. Under a glorious bowl of blue sky they drove past the clipped emerald greensward of the Merion Cricket Club (of which Cassatt was president), and onto a meandering drive past a flock of Shropshire sheep cropping buttercups. Nestled among the trees stood Cheswold, Cassatt’s charmingly gabled fieldstone mansion, now completely ivy-covered with gaily striped awnings at all the windows. Cassatt, the master of this country paradise, was out in the fields exercising one of his beloved horses. The men redirected their carriages down another road and spied him.

Frank Thomson (middle), president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1897–1899, died in office.

Cassatt stood in the June sunshine, perhaps thinking of his very good life as a country gentleman, knowing as well as anyone present the almost insuperable problems bedeviling the railroad. His fellow board members got down from their carriages, and offered him their greatest honor, the presidency of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He paused and then responded quietly that yes, he would be very interested. But, Cassatt warned them, if he became president, he would pursue a swift and monumental expansion. He would require a completely free, almost dictatorial, hand to proceed as boldly as he felt necessary. The conservative board, attired in their dark frock coats, heard his hard-edged determination to do big things and murmured uncertainly as they departed. Agnes Repplier, a Philadelphia essayist of that time, deemed her hometown “a droll city…And tepid. Oh, so tepid.” The board was not certain about such boldness.

But ultimately, the board of directors capitulated, for no other man could possibly match Cassatt’s engineering experience and prodigious knowledge of the complex PRR system or his steely nerve. One railroad president declared at the time, “No person understands better than he the financial conditions and policy of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and no man is more familiar with the details of the management. Why there is scarcely a man of any consequence in the employ of the company that Cassatt does not know personally.” Within the PRR, he was widely regarded as “the ablest man this Railway ever produced,” a compliment of the highest order, for no railroad was near the equal of the fabled Pennsylvania (even in its current distress), hailed by American Architect as “the most intelligent and thoughtful railway corporation in the world.”

And so it was in late spring 1899 that Cassatt found himself president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And, after all these decades, he was dreaming seriously of spanning the Hudson River.