Background
Martin Withington Clement was born on December 5, 1881 in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Charles Maxwell Clement, a lawyer, and Alice Virginia Withington.
Martin Withington Clement was born on December 5, 1881 in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Charles Maxwell Clement, a lawyer, and Alice Virginia Withington.
He graduated from Trinity College with a B. S. in 1901.
Clement joined the engineering staff of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) in New York City, where he participated in surveying tunnels the company was building under the Hudson River. Clement was promoted to track supervisor in the office of the general manager in Philadelphia in 1910. He held the same post on the PRR Manhattan and Pittsburgh divisions in 1913 and, the following year, was named division engineer of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, a PRR subsidiary. In 1916 he became chief engineer of the heavily traveled New Jersey division. Two years later, when the PRR was controlled by the United States Railroad Administration, Clement was appointed superintendent of freight transportation for lines east of Pittsburgh, his first nonengineering assignment. The next year, he served as lines-east superintendent of passenger traffic, and in 1920, when the railroad was returned to private control, he was named superintendent of the Lake Division, with headquarters in Cleveland. His rapid advance through the operating ranks continued in 1923, when he moved to Pittsburgh as general manager of the PRR Central Region, which encompassed divisions from Crestline, Ohio, to Altoona. Two years later he returned to the PRR general offices in Philadelphia as assistant vice-president in charge of operations. In that capacity and as vice-president in charge of operations from 1926 to 1933, Clement had systemwide responsibility for the efficient running of trains. In October 1933 he became vice-president, with jurisdiction over all departments of the railroad. The poor health of William Wallace Atterbury, the PRR president, led to Clement being named acting president in 1934 and, following Atterbury's resignation in April 1935, president. Clement served in that post until 1949, when he became the first chairman of the board, a position fashioned largely by Clement himself. As chairman he served as a spokesman for the PRR and the entire railroad industry on issues of political, financial, and public interest. The president of the PRR (Walter S. Franklin was Clement's immediate successor) thereafter handled routine operations. This arrangement lasted through the Penn Central era (1968 - 1976). Clement retired in 1951 and spent his remaining years at his Rosemont estate, Crefeld, in suburban Philadelphia. He resembled Atterbury and virtually all previous PRR presidents in that he had spent most of his career as an engineer and operating man. By the time he became chief executive, he had acquired an intimate knowledge of all aspects of running what by most standards was the nation's largest railroad. Also in keeping with PRR tradition, Clement ruled in a dictatorial manner. He had a large, hulking frame and an equally formidable will. "Imposing in presence, positive in opinion, quick in decision, and unrelenting in drive--the complete generalissimo, " was the way Fortune characterized him in 1948. As vice-president of operations, Clement directed one of the largest capital improvement programs in railroad history--the electrification of the PRR mainline between New York and Philadelphia. Atterbury had inaugurated the project in 1928, but his attention had been diverted by proposals for railroad consolidations then under consideration in industry and government circles and by the financial exigencies of the Great Depression. It was left to Clement to implement the electrification scheme, as well as to pare operating expenditures. Subsequent reductions helped placed the PRR among the relatively few lines that remained profitable. Early in Clement's presidency, the railroad reached its peak of efficiency, posting an operating ratio of 71. 2 percent in 1939. Clement also presided over extensions of electrification from Philadelphia west to Harrisburg, improved passenger service (for example, most cars on through trains received air-conditioning), and expanded the PRR trucking business. At the height of World War II, in what was one of its finest hours, the railroad carried twice the freight tonnage and four times the passengers that it had carried in 1939, without the kind of congestion that had brought rail traffic to a standstill in World War I. However, aside from electrification, capital improvements lagged; Clement followed a financially conservative course that favored debt reduction over modernization of the physical plant. The PRR did not begin large-scale replacement of steam locomotives with diesels until 1947, by which time 80 percent of its 4, 500-unit steam fleet was more than twenty years old. The higher costs of using obsolete motive power, combined with a failure to renew a physical plant worn out by heavy war traffic, were among the reasons why the railroad suffered the first annual deficit ($8. 5 million) in its history in 1946--ironically, its centennial year. Although not as prominent an industry spokesman as Atterbury, Clement did serve on several Association of American Railroads and government committees examining problems relating to railroad retirement, labor relations, and government regulation. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the joint labor-management Committee of Six, whose recommendations contributed to the Transportation Act of 1940. Clement died in Rosemont. It was only fitting that, at the hour Clement's funeral was to begin, all trains on the PRR thirteen-state system were brought to a brief halt.
Although a strict Republican, Clement greatly reduced the PRR role in Pennsylvania state politics, where it had been the right arm of the Republican party for decades. Clement had a sense of history.
On April 14, 1910, he married Irene Harrison Higbee; they had three children. His wife died in 1929, and on February 14, 1931, he married Elizabeth Wallace.
