The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman

Maury Klein

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807860779
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

To Americans living in the early twentieth century, E. H. Harriman was as familiar a name as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Like his fellow businessmen, Harriman (1847-1909) had become the symbol for an entire industry: Morgan stood for banking, Rockefeller for oil, Carnegie for iron and steel, and Harriman for railroads. Here, Maury Klein offers the first in-depth biography in more than seventy-five years of this influential yet surprisingly understudied figure. A Wall Street banker until age fifty, Harriman catapulted into the railroad arena in 1897, gaining control of the Union Pacific Railroad as it emerged from bankruptcy and successfully modernizing every aspect of its operation. He went on to expand his empire by acquiring large stakes in other railroads, including the Southern Pacific and the Baltimore and Ohio, in the process clashing with such foes as James J. Hill, J. P. Morgan, and Theodore Roosevelt. With its new insights into the myths and controversies that surround Harriman's career, this book reasserts his legacy as one of the great turn-of-the-century business titans. Originally published 2000. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Part 1. Duchy

1848–1898

1. Sources of Pride and Strength

The circumstances and conditions that have a determining influence upon a man’s life and character often antedate, by many years, his own conscious existence…. When he first becomes conscious of himself and his environment, he is already caught in a web of external relations, conditions and circumstances from which he seldom afterward escapes.

—George Kennan, Autobiography

For a time early in the nineteenth century the Harriman family seemed destined to an inglorious end in a watery grave. Three of William Harriman’s sons met with death at sea in very different ways. The eldest, William, died in a naval clash between English and French ships. Alphonso drowned in the waters off the Battery after the family moved to New York, and Edward simply vanished. His father had made him master of cargo on one of the vessels he fitted out for the West Indies, but the ship never reached port and was never heard from again. Three other sons had died in childhood, leaving only one to carry on the family name. Orlando did not need his mother’s fervent pleas to spurn adventure at sea in favor of joining his father in business. Upon that frail reed rose the Harriman dynasty.¹

From the first it was shrouded in mystery. No one knows what induced William to leave his comfortable life as a stationer in London. He was said to be in sympathy with the colonial cause, yet he did not sail for America until April 1795, long after the issues of war and peace had been decided. He was not a poor man; some of his neighbors in New Haven, where he first resided, liked to refer to him as “the rich Englishman.” Nor was it a move to be lightly considered. William brought with him the baggage of a full life: a wife, six children, and his wife’s sister, Rosamond Holmes. Whatever pushed or pulled him across the sea had to be of more than ordinary force.

Once settled in New Haven, William tried his luck at the West Indies trade until the treacherous currents of commerce swallowed most of the money he had brought from England. After a few years he took his family to New York City, where he gradually shifted from shipping to a general commission business. There William prospered in a modest way, and young Orlando did well enough to open his own office on Pearl Street in 1811. By the time of Williams death around 1820, Orlando had built well on the foundation provided by his father.²

Like his father, Orlando possessed a cold, practical nature that suited a merchant, but he did not neglect the social graces entirely. He met his wife at a dancing school they had both attended since childhood. Anna Ingland was the pampered only daughter of a good family, accomplished in needlework and music as well as dance, and surprisingly practical despite having been indulged all her life. Orlando married her in 1810 when he was only nineteen and just starting out in business. Some thought him rash, but the Harrimans showed a knack for marrying wisely and well that endured for generations.³

Their marriage produced twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. The matter of names counted for much to families of ambition, who always had an eye cocked toward posterity. This posed a delicate problem for Orlando. He had been named by his aunt Rosamond after a favorite character in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The fit could not have been less appropriate; there was nothing of the romantic in Orlando, who came to loathe his name. With great reluctance he passed it along to his eldest son but thereafter used his influence to fill later generations with Williams and Edwards and other conventional names befitting good businessmen.⁴

Destiny seemed intent on mocking his intentions. The only child he lost in infancy was named William. Orlando then passed the name to his next son, who died unmarried at the age of thirty. His remaining sons were given the prosaic names of Edward, James, Charles, and Frederick. Only the youngest, Oliver, received a name that smacked of the unusual, and he amassed a larger fortune in business than any of the others. It would have amazed Orlando to know that the Harrimans who left the greatest mark on history descended from his namesake son, the least successful of them all, and that neither Edward nor his sons, William and Edward, ever used those names.

His growing family kept obliging Orlando to find larger quarters. After a siege of yellow fever quarantined the family, Orlando moved them to a stately old house on Broome Street. Sheltered by rows of maple and elm trees, the house sat in the middle of a large, sloping lawn that became the gathering place for the children and their friends. At the nearby Dutch Reformed Church the Harrimans entered a new social circle that included Herveys, Van Alens, Livingstons, and Lows, who remained their friends for generations.⁵

The children grew up in this comfortable, idyllic setting until a devastating fire ravaged New York’s business district in 1837 and dealt Orlando a blow from which he was slow to recover. As the boys came of age, they joined their father in business except for young Orlando, who showed a flair for scholarship. He was sent off to Columbia, where he did well enough to graduate with honors. Lacking any talent for business, Orlando chose the ministry. In the spring of 1841 he was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church, the first Harriman to eschew commerce for the professions.⁶

It proved an unhappy precedent. Young Orlando was as ill suited for the ministry as he was for business. Like so many of the Harrimans, he possessed a cold, austere personality that seldom warmed or moved his parishioners. The name “Orlando” mocked him as it had his father; he had not a shred of that character’s charm or spirit, for which intellectual diligence was a poor substitute. At nineteen he had penned an essay on happiness in which, like St. Paul, he ruled out wealth and glory in favor of goodness and contentment, “the practice of every virtue and the abstaining from every vice.” These words served as a perfect epitaph for a life that practiced virtue dutifully without ever veering close to wealth or glory.⁷

The one gift Orlando did reveal was the family knack for marrying well. Cornelia Neilson was the daughter of a well-known physician and elder of the Dutch Reformed Church. One of her ancestors had served on George Washington’s staff, and the family tree was intertwined with Stuyvesants, Fishes, Bleeckers, and Livingstons. Cornelia was a strong, proud woman with a fierce sense of family. Why she accepted Orlando is a mystery unless at twenty-six she had no other offers and prospects looked bleak.⁸

Their life together got off to a rocky start. The marriage was planned for the spring of 1840, but Orlandos health forced a postponement. By the time it finally took place two years later, Orlando had been ordained and was seeking a position. All his life the one thing that constantly eluded him was a place suitable to his needs. In 1843 he finally found a post as assistant rector at a church in Tarrytown. It took him another year to get a parish of his own, St. George’s at Hempstead, Long Island.⁹

The marriage produced six children, all of whom survived. It says much about Cornelia’s influence that the first son, John Neilson (1843), received her father’s name while the second son, born a year later, got his father’s unwanted name. Anna (1846) was named after Orlando’s mother. Not until the fourth child arrived in 1848 did Orlando resort to the family store of prosaic names; he was called Edward Henry and in later years never cared much for either name. He was followed by Cornelia (1850) and William (1854).

As in most small country parishes, the pay at St. George’s was meager and often in arrears. As his family grew, Orlando found himself in a losing struggle to make ends meet. In 1849 he quarreled with his vestry over back salary still owed him. Shortly afterward a post as assistant rector opened up on Staten Island, but Orlando could not support his family with the pay. With prospects in the East so grim, he began looking for a place in the West. In 1850 he received an offer from a small parish in the California mountains, where the gold rush had created a frenzy of migration. Unable to find anything better, Orlando decided to try it.¹⁰

Cornelia Harriman must have blanched at the news. Her strong sense of family and social pride were firmly rooted in the East. That was where she and her children counted for something, where she hoped to see them prosper. In the West they would be one more batch of nobodies, and poor ones at that. If one had to be poor, better to be among family and friends who knew your social worth. Orlando understood these things, and he realized the perils offered by the trip itself. There were only three ways to reach California: the long overland trek, the still longer sea journey around Cape Horn, and the shorter sea journey with its dangerous overland hike through the jungle at the Isthmus of Panama. All of them required stamina and a healthy dose of good luck; for a family with small children the odds got much longer. Orlando could see only one way to manage it. Leaving his family in Hempstead, he sailed alone for Panama in May 1850.

The rugged trip across the isthmus left Orlando weak and exhausted. He fell ill with fever and lay helpless for a month in Panama before he was strong enough to board a steamer for San Francisco. Once arrived in California, he was stunned to learn that the parish, having heard nothing from him for so long a time, had hired another minister. The next year sorely tested his faith in God as he wandered about the state, preaching in mining camps and raw frontier towns, founding a small church in Stockton, and braving a cholera epidemic to start another one in Sacramento.¹¹

During those months everything was a struggle and nothing seemed permanent. Slowly, painfully, Orlando came to the harsh truth that there was nothing for him in California. Broken in health and spirit, he climbed aboard a steamer in March 1851 and endured the long journey back to New York. If, as his youthful essay stated, happiness consisted in large measure of contentment, Orlando was not a happy man. After a year’s absence he came home to tell his anxious family that the whole adventure had been a dismal failure.

The search for a place resumed. Orlando brought his family from Hempstead to a small house on Hamilton Square in Jersey City, where he found work for meager pay as a semiattached curate in one of the city's churches. While Orlando floundered, his brothers had commenced their careers in business. William and Edward joined their father in the family firm of William Harriman & Company, which had an office at 128 Front Street. Young Oliver started out as a commission merchant on his way to earning a fortune in dry goods.¹²

The family did what it could to help Orlando. In his earnest, fumbling way he grew desperate enough to try his hand at business in partnership with his brothers. During the early 1850s he juggled his duties as curate with work in the family firm, struggling to learn matters utterly foreign to him. When William’s untimely death dissolved the firm in 1856, Edward continued it with Orlando as his partner. But Edward also had his own drug import company to run, and Orlando proved as inept in business as he had in managing his own affairs. The arrangement lasted only about a year before a chastened Orlando gave up the experiment and went back to the dreary hunt for a parish of his own.¹³

The search brought him two churches. So wretched was the pay at these small parishes that Orlando was obliged to take both, preaching at Clairemont in the morning and walking to West Hoboken every Sunday afternoon. After he had served for seven years, the West Hoboken church owed him nearly two years’ back salary. Unable to collect more than verbal praise from his congregation, he left the post in October 1866.¹⁴

The pattern of Orlandos life had become painfully clear. While his brothers climbed steadily to prosperous careers, he failed at everything he tried except marriage. The needs of his own family threw Orlando onto the charity of both the Harrimans and the Neilsons. His ineptness doomed him to the role of poor relation in proud and distinguished families that could not have entirely concealed the disdain they felt over his bumbling. When he finally achieved some semblance of financial security well into middle age, it came in the form of a final humiliation: a modest inheritance left his wife by one of her relatives.

It was only fitting that Orlando find himself dependent on his wife’s family at the end. Through these years of tribulation it was Cornelia Harriman who kept the family together through sheer strength of character. Herself a creature of tradition, she impressed this sense of pride and place on all her children. Hardship, poverty, even humiliation could be borne so long as they remembered who they were and where they belonged. The worse their prospects, the taller they stood in defiance of them.

While all the children absorbed this lesson, one learned it especially well. The rigors of a childhood in which the family was constantly dependent on the largesse of others left a deep imprint on Edward Henry Harriman. Two lessons in particular were drilled into his character: the importance of family sticking together and sustaining one another and the determination never to be dependent on others. He would never suffer the petty slights and humiliations endured by his father because he could not make his own way in life. Orlando was a good but impractical man in a world that belonged to the practical. His son would not make that mistake. Indeed, the third and perhaps most important lesson he absorbed was learning the importance of finding ways to get things done.

Edward Henry Harriman never talked about these matters later in life when the public lusted greedily for details of his youth. The dogged efforts to cast his upbringing in the Horatio Alger mold got no help from him, but he revealed something of his feelings in a less obvious way. He named a daughter after his mother, but no son bore his father’s name. To his thinking, the world had more Orlandos than it needed; certainly he wanted no more reminders of their presence.

The child born February 25, 1848, to Cornelia Harriman would never be an imposing physical specimen. All his life Henry was the runt of the litter, a largeeared, weak-eyed bantam who made up in scrappiness what he lacked in size. Where others intimidated through size or strength, Henry did so through sheer force of will fueled by volcanic bursts of energy. An acquaintance from school days remembered him as “the worst little devil in his class, and always at the to...