{"id":13864,"date":"2019-12-16T13:30:24","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T18:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=13864"},"modified":"2019-12-16T21:48:30","modified_gmt":"2019-12-17T02:48:30","slug":"the-railroad-tycoon-of-rittenhouse-square","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2019\/12\/the-railroad-tycoon-of-rittenhouse-square\/","title":{"rendered":"The Railroad Tycoon of Rittenhouse Square"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Thomas Alexander Scott Mansion, 1830 Rittenhouse Square from King’s Views of Philadelphia<\/em>, 1902 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt is difficult for Americans today to imagine the grandeur of the elite life-style of a Rittenhouse Square at the end of the nineteenth century,\u201d wrote historian Dennis Clark. \u201cThe class culture of such neighborhoods created what amounted to a fairyland of elegance and display protected by Victorian codes of civility and discrimination. These enclaves of privilege combined architectural eclecticism with passionate embellishment, lavish furnishings, and an adoration of English upper-class family etiquette. Flamboyant architects like Frank Furness and Theophilus Chandler designed edifices for an almost hysterical display of wealth.\u201d Illustrations<\/a> of these \u201cwildly adorned shrines to aggressive vanity and the obsessive flaunting of riches\u201d were published proudly in King\u2019s Views of Philadelphia<\/a><\/em> of 1902.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt no other time in the city\u2019s history, before or since,\u201d wrote sociologist Digby Baltzell. \u201chave so many wealthy and fashionable families lived so near one another.\u201d Here was a neighborhood built by great industrial-era fortunes made in banking, investments, dental tools, pharmaceuticals, giant knitting mills, big sugar, and, of course, the Pennsylvania Railroad.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most opulent and most egregious of these houses, at the southeast corner of 19th<\/sup> and Rittenhouse, was Frank Furness\u2019 52-room design of 1875 for Thomas A. Scott. This \u201cquintessential railroad man of his generation,\u201d described by a New York newspaper editor as \u201cthe Pennsylvania Napoleon,\u201d who came across as \u201cambitious to take possession of the republic under a nine hundred and ninety-nine-year lease.\u201d<\/p>\n

As great-great-granddaughter Janny Scott recently recounted, Thomas Scott transformed \u201cwhat had merely been a Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh carrier into a six-thousand-mile system of railroads stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.\u201d The influence of his corporation \u201ceventually extended as far as New Orleans, Colorado, Arizona and Mexico.\u201d Scott and his predecessor, J. Edgar Thomson, controlled \u201cnot only the biggest freight carrier in the world but the most profitable corporation in North America.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, largely due to one infamous quotation, Scott would become \u201cone of the most consistently and thoroughly vilified business executives in the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

This notorious quotation, uttered during what is known as the great railroad strike of 1877, is considered \u201cthe beginning of the age of industrial and class warfare in the United States.\u201d\u00a0Janny Scott explains in her book The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father<\/a>:<\/em> \u201cFour years into the longest recession in American history, and in response to new wage cuts and work rules, train crews in Maryland and West Virginia walked off the job. Then a strike broke out in Pittsburgh, where railroad workers blockaded the yards. People with other grievances against the railroad joined the protest. So did factory and mill workers and others whom the recession had left homeless and unemployed. After the National Guard troops were called in, members of the crowd attacked them. Troops fired back, killing at least ten people and wounding many more. Protesters looted gun shops, seizing weapons. Someone lit a freight car on fire, and the blaze spread; other cars, filled with coke and oil, burst into flames. Roundhouses, an engine house, a machine shop burned. Troops killed more rioters. After three days, one hundred twenty-six locomotives and sixteen hundred freight and passenger cars had been destroyed. The railroad estimated the damage to its property at two million dollars. Ever since that time, Thomas Scott, then in his third year as the railroad\u2019s president, had been quoted as having suggested the rioters be given \u201ca rifle diet for a few days, and see how they like that bread.”<\/p>\n

Little did it seem to matter that at least one historian has found \u201cthe most thorough contemporaneous accounts of the riot . . . makes no mention of any such statement,\u201d Thomas Scott\u2019s reputation as a ruthless railroad tycoon had long been seared into public memory.<\/p>\n

[Sources: Dennis Clark, \u201cRamcat and Rittenhouse Square,\u201d in William W. Cutler, III and Howard Gillette, Jr.\u00a0The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975\u00a0<\/em>(Westport: Greenwood Press); Digby Baltzell, \u00a0Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class<\/em> (The Free Press, 1958); Janny Scott, The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father (<\/em>Riverhead Books, 2019).]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is difficult for Americans today to imagine the grandeur of the elite life-style of a Rittenhouse Square at the end of the nineteenth century,\u201d wrote historian Dennis Clark. \u201cThe class culture of such neighborhoods created what amounted to a fairyland of elegance and display protected by Victorian codes of civility and discrimination. These enclaves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}