TWENTY-TWO

“THE ONLY RAILROAD STATESMAN”

Charles McKim stood on the deck of the S.S. Provence as it sailed toward Manhattan under late October skies. He was slipping quietly back from Europe with the widowed Bessie White and her son Larry. The view that met his gaze as the liner steamed into the harbor was one of aggressively tall buildings. As H. G. Wells, a contemporary ocean voyager, described the vista, “The sky-scrapers that are the New-Yorker’s perpetual boast and pride rise up to greet one as one comes through the Narrows into the Upper Bay…[They] stand out, in a clustering group of tall irregular crenelations, the strangest crown that ever a city wore. Happy returning natives greet the great pillars of business by name, the St. Paul Building, the World, the Manhattan tower.” Wells marveled, too, as did every visitor, at the frenetic crowded chaos of Gotham, first palpable on the busy waterways. “Across the broad harbor plies an unfamiliar traffic of grotesque broad ferry boats, black with people, glutted to the lips with vans and carts, each hooting and yelping its own distinctive note, and there is a wild hurrying up and down and to and fro of piping and bellowing tugs and barges, and a great floating platform, bearing a railway train…Everything is moving at a great speed and whistling and howling.”

McKim, who had turned fifty-nine while in France, leaned into the breeze watching Gotham come closer, observing the skyline with unhappy heart. These ever-taller behemoth buildings that now dominated his adopted metropolis offended his sense of aesthetics. But worse was the melancholy prospect of a world bereft of one of his oldest, dearest friends. In the wake of Stanford White’s murder, McKim had found solace in his leisurely shooting holiday on the moors of Scotland and “the simple diet of fresh air and oat-meal of my Highland ancestors.” He had then lingered in London, feeling under the weather, before rejoining Bessie and her son in Paris for further recuperative travels motoring through Normandy and Touraine. Now, as their French liner steamed toward Manhattan, there was little illusion about what lay ahead. “I fear nothing—anymore,” Bessie had written one of her sisters, “and am laying in a good stock of strength and courage to be ready for the winter which is bound to be a hard one.”

Manhattan skyline in 1908.

McKim and the Whites landed and emerged with their trunks from the perils of the U.S. Customs shed into the pleasant day, threading their way through the melee of West Street. Each dreaded Harry Thaw’s impending trial for murdering White—sure to be a lurid and painful legal circus. Bessie quickly departed to live in Cambridge, where her son would begin his final year at Harvard. McKim settled back into his third-floor apartment at 9 East Thirty-fifth Street and faced the Augean task of untangling White’s large and labyrinthine debts, and somehow salvaging something for Bessie. McKim, Mead & White alone was reportedly owed $600,000. Before departing, McKim had ordered that in their own offices all White’s “pictures, tapestries, bronzes, marbles, stuffs, objects, whatsoever, in the reception rooms (large and small), as well as in Stanford’s office, should at once be placed in storage.”

With White dead and his treasures packed away, McKim returned to find his firm’s offices sadly altered. “Our sense of personal loss,” wrote McKim to a friend, “and loss to the office and the profession, is only exceeded by Mrs. White’s courage and fortitude under so crushing a blow.”

McKim’s immediate professional concern when he returned to work were certain pressing Penn Station design questions. He was aghast to learn about the siting of the station’s planned powerhouse. He protested to the PRR, “There can be no question that the construction of two steel chimneys of a height of 180 feet, in such close proximity to the terminal would strike a fatal blow at the new station.” And yet the evolving site of his magnificent railroad temple—just eleven blocks north of his office—had become one of the wonders of Gotham.

The vast Penn Station canyon was rimmed by brownstones bedecked with clotheslines and family laundry, a homely contrast with the monumental enterprise below. All day and night, onlookers were omnipresent, drawn by the spectacle of legions of men and powerful, noisy machines working around the clock to gouge away at this gaping valley now nicknamed “The Culebra Cut,” after the similar digging underway at the Panama Canal. “As quickly as the buildings disappeared from this once closely populated district,” observed a journalist from the New York Herald, “an immense amount of excavating machinery was installed. Railroad tracks were laid in every direction [to remove spoil] and the ground soon lost all semblance to its former civilization. Today the resemblance to the canal zone is complete. The land…has been ridged and furrowed until its original topography is but a memory. Long, uneven alleys stretch east and west upward of half a mile in length, through which noisy [work] trains pass on a very busy schedule. The depths of these valleys at many points completely hides the trains from the surrounding country. At several points the tract is dominated by several hills which rise twenty feet or more above the level of the valleys. There are several miles of railroad tracks in constant use, with switches and crossings—a complete railroad system.” The public was beguiled by the sheer bold scale of the enterprise.

A May 7, 1908, Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Penn Station excavation shows a propped-up Ninth Avenue Elevated and the locomotive pulling a train of debris toward a Hudson River pier.

While in Britain and France, McKim had heard the rumors that Alexander Cassatt, now sixty-seven, was in poor health, but found them hard to believe. After all, the PRR president was a big, physically powerful man, a lifelong athlete and equestrian, equally at ease charging across the hedgerows foxhunting and handling the demands of driving a four-in-hand. Yet, word had it, the indomitable Cassatt was far from well. Any man would have felt the accumulated strain of Cassatt’s outsized labors. For six years now, he had been engaged in gargantuan corporate undertakings. He had fought battles with Andrew Carnegie, George Gould, Tammany, and all those who opposed Teddy Roosevelt’s railroad rate regulations.

The revelations of the Interstate Commerce Commission had exacted a toll, but the PRR’s internal investigation had found the kickbacks limited to a handful of cases: Of “more than 300 operators of bituminous coal mines, situated on the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad, less than 10 operators in all have testified that they believed themselves to have been unfairly discriminated against.” The fifty trained accountants unleashed to delve into the holdings of 2,501 PRR officers and employees concluded that “few, if any” of the ICC charges of rate discrimination and favoritism bore up under detailed study. This was, Cassatt wrote from Bar Harbor, a great relief. “I have been somewhat fearful all along that the result might be the reverse…[and] might be used in evidence in suits.” Cassatt had not had the heart for any further firings, certainly not his own longtime assistant and aide-de-camp, William Patton. Instead, every PRR employee was ordered to divest himself of all coal holdings. And so, as the summer had waned, Cassatt could feel that the worst of the ICC firestorm was behind him and he could enjoy his sojourn in Maine.

The Bar Harbor summer colony preferred its money quiet (automobiles were banned from town) and its social life genteel—tennis, picnics, regattas, and dog and horse shows. Its summer “rusticators” were substantial men like Cassatt, publisher Joseph Pulitzer, financier Jacob H. Schiff, former New York mayor Seth Low, and distinguished lawyers, physicians, and professors. Their large picturesque shingle-style “cottages” lined the seashore, set amidst manicured lawns, flowerbeds, and rambling gravel paths. Some years J. P. Morgan caused a stir by sailing in with guests (none his wife) on his yacht, the Corsair. Here the excesses of Newport, Rhode Island, evoked scorn. In Bar Harbor, no bored millionaires in Versailles-like palaces hosted dinner parties to meet one Prince del Drago, who turned out to be a monkey. Nor would any local hostess fete one hundred pampered dogs as her guests of honor, some reportedly dining in fancy dress.

The Cassatt family had arrived on July 5 at Four Acres, their Arts and Crafts mansion overlooking the jagged coast of Bar Harbor. On the best of days, when the morning fog lifted, the Maine sky scintillated blue, the sun warmed, and the copses of towering pines perfumed the air. Cassatt always brought his horses and carriages north, but on summer mornings he liked nothing better than heading to the Yacht Club to sail his thirty-foot sloop, Scud. With all the sailing and sea air, Cassatt felt better every week.

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. Policemen 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:

Harriman may struggle for the N.P. stock;

Hill may try to keep the interests pooled;

Vanderbilt of Atchison may get a block;

Pittsburgh may be opened up by Gould

But the Pennsylvania need never fear,

While the helm is held by A.J.C.

With his men behind him he can safely steer,

And his railroad first always will be.

Outside the Cassatt mansion, the hundreds of damp onlookers in the park ignored the steady rain, relishing the luxurious pomp of magnificent horse-drawn carriages and chauffeur-driven motorcars splashing up through the rain. The crowd gawked as dozens of somber railroad presidents, a U.S. senator, and several eminent financiers emerged from these splendid conveyances, men large in girth and corporate power, sporting silk top hats, clutching canes. Many murmured curiously, wondering just how rich Cassatt had been? Not until the will became public would the sum be known: $10 million. There was a satisfied stir at glimpses of such millionaire titans of Wall Street as Edward Harriman, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick, dour, fearsome men well known from the nation’s front pages.

Inside the increasingly crowded parlor, the clock struck one, and William Patton stood up and reverently closed the lid of the coffin, gazing down on his patron for the last time. Perhaps he felt a twinge of guilt for his role in the ill-starred ICC scandal, for he had acquired one of the larger fortunes in “free” coal stocks. On the lid lay two bouquets of purple violets, Cassatt’s favorite flower, and wreaths from Cassatt’s sister Mary, in Paris, and his brother Gardner. By now three hundred guests had squeezed in, filling all the chairs in the parlor, adjacent music room, and entry hall. Even a few millionaires were obliged to stand, pressed in back along the walls and in the corners. Suddenly the whisperings and murmurings were pierced by the sweet boyish strains of choir boys singing “O Paradise.” As the music filled and quieted the rooms, Lois and other family members, all dressed in deepest mourning, walked slowly into the parlor and stood by the closed casket for the service.

Later that afternoon, a far smaller group reassembled in the rain out in Bryn Mawr at the rustic stone Church of the Redeemer. Lois, a sad figure in her dark coat, black-veiled hat, and muff, had prevailed in keeping the graveside service more private. President and Mrs. Roosevelt had sent a wreath of dark greens and white hyacinths, an offering some felt should not have been accepted. As the mourners ringed the large muddy grave, the heavens opened and the rain drummed down so ferociously few could hear the readings.

In this most respected and meritocratic of great American corporations, the accession to president was swift and orderly. James McCrea, a tall, bearded Scotsman who had also begun at the bottom as a rodman many decades earlier and who had long run all the PRR lines west of Pittsburgh, was promoted to president. Samuel Rea, who long ago had had his first job under McCrea, became second vice president. It would now fall to Rea to guide the great New York tunnels and terminal to completion. Rea wrote a Wall Street friend about Cassatt, “He was a great man and a noble character, and aside from the great loss officially it is a severe personal loss, and the last seven years association with him was the pleasantest period of my life.”