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(The auction catalog for the estate of Thomas Fortune Ryan...)
The auction catalog for the estate of Thomas Fortune Ryan, an American tobacco, insurance, and transportation magnate. The auction was held at Anderson Galleries, New York, November 23-25, 1933. 465 lots in the auction are described, many illustrated from photographs, a few as photogravures, and four plates in color.
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Thomas Fortune Ryan was born on a small farm in Lovingston, Nelson County, Va. , of southern Irish stock. According to an obituary notice (Baltimore Sun, November 24, 1928), his father was George Ryan and his mother's maiden name was Fortune. His early life followed the accepted pattern of the American success story. He was left orphaned and penniless at fourteen.
At seventeen Ryan made his way to Baltimore. The lanky, angular country boy walked the streets for days until he was finally hired as an errand boy in the dry-goods commission house of John S. Barry. In 1872, at the age of twenty-one, Ryan went to New York, where he started as a messenger, or "pad-shover, " in a Wall Street brokerage firm.
Soon, largely with the financial aid of John S. Barry, he became a partner in a firm of his own, Lee, Ryan and Warren; and in 1874 he purchased a seat on the Stock Exchange. For a decade he carried on his brokerage work with skill and silence. He became a Tammany man, a contributor to Tammany funds, and a member of the general committee of the Hall. He was at thirty-three a slender, long-legged, long-armed young man, over six feet in height, fashionably dressed, with a knack for making the right contacts. His opportunity for carving out a real fortune came with the struggle for street-railway franchises in New York City.
In 1883 he organized the New York Cable Railroad, a paper organization which entered a three-cornered fight with Jacob Sharp and William C. Whitney for the control of the Broadway surface franchise from Union Square to the Battery. Sharp won, by distributing a half million in cash to the "boodle aldermen. " Ryan and Whitney stood ready to parcel out three quarters of a million in bribes, but only half was in cash and the rest in stock Ryan's next step was to persuade Whitney and Peter A. B. Widener, in December 1884, to pool their resources and continue the fight for the franchise. Ryan was in direct charge of operations, pushing legal suits against Sharp, and inaugurating a state legislative investigation. Sharp, seeing that all was lost, sold his stock to the Ryan syndicate, but the matter had gone too far to be hushed up. The legislature annulled the franchise; Sharp was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for bribery but died, uttering incoherent accusations, before appeal could be taken. The syndicate, after a two-year court fight waged through Elihu Root, succeeded in having the annulment declared unconstitutional, and bid in the franchise and the property of Sharp's railroad for $25, 000. Using this as their basis they extended their properties until by 1900 the Metropolitan Street Railway Company (incorporated in 1893) controlled practically every line in the city. The methods used in this process have served as a model in public-utility promotion.
The Metropolitan Traction Company, which was organized (1886), in Ryan's own words, as a "great tin box" to hold the securities of the various companies of the syndicate, is considered to have been the first holding company in the United States. Franchises were acquired through political influence; small lines were bought up, their stock was watered, and then exchanged at absurdly inflated valuations for the stock of the Metropolitan; other roads were leased at excessive rentals, the members of the syndicate securing large sums for negotiating the leases and meanwhile buying into the stock of the leased road, whose dividends were guaranteed through the fixed rentals; when new lines had to be constructed or old lines overhauled the work was done at fantastic costs by companies under the control of the syndicate members; the Metropolitan securities were boosted in value by artificially maintained dividends, and when in 1899 the stock had been pushed to $269 the insiders unloaded on an enthusiastic public.
In 1902, when disaster to the roads was impending, Ryan persuaded Jacob H. Schiff, of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, to join him in a reorganization, the Metropolitan Securities Company. In 1905 Ryan found himself threatened by the competition of the new subway system, which August Belmont had been shrewd enough to finance. Ryan first sought to persuade and then determined to frighten Belmont into merging his enormously profitable Interborough Rapid Transit Company with the Metropolitan. When Belmont attempted to extend his subway franchises, Ryan bid for the franchise himself, offering to give transfers that would be good on his surface lines as well, thereby achieving a "unified" city transportation system.
He took care to accelerate public enthusiasm for his proposal by the efforts of Lemuel E. Quigg, one of the most skillful, and one of the earliest, publicity agents. Belmont finally surrendered in 1905, and the two systems were consolidated and further overcapitalized in a new $200, 000, 000 corporation. Ryan invested his financial methods with an air of respectability by calling in, as the president of the new Interborough-Metropolitan Company, Theodore P. Shonts, a member of Roosevelt's Panama Canal Commission.
In 1906 Ryan retired from his traction interests, leaving behind him doom and collapse. The Metropolitan went into receivership in 1907. In 1908 Frederick W. Whitridge, the receiver for the Third Avenue System, estimated that of a thirty-five million dollar Ryan bond issue fifteen million could not be accounted for at all, and the other twenty million had been spent recklessly on padded construction contracts and in the distribution of political plums. Soon the remaining Ryan traction companies went into bankruptcy.
Robert M. La Follette stated on the floor of the Senate, March. 19, 1908, that "the Metropolitan Interborough Traction Company cleaned up, at the lowest estimate, $100, 000, 000 by methods which should have committed many of the participants to the penitentiary" (Congressional Record, 60 Cong. , 1 Sess. , p. 3568).
Ryan was always the financial executive, and even before Whitney died in 1904 he had become the controlling person in the syndicate, which became known as the "Ryan crowd. " Whitney called him "the most adroit, suave and noiseless man" that American finance had known, and had prophesied in 1901 that if he lived Ryan would become one of the wealthiest men in the country.
In 1905, before he withdrew from the Metropolitan, his fortune was at a low estimate in excess of $50, 000, 000, and his power extended over resources in banking, public utilities, and industrial enterprises totalling over a billion dollars. Early in the nineties he and Whitney organized the American Tobacco Company with a capitalization of twenty-five million dollars. In 1898 it was recapitalized at over seventy million; in 1904, after several mergers, it was again recapitalized at a total, including bonds, of over $250, 000, 000. Through a series of mergers it secured virtually complete monopolistic control of the industry, and on May 29, 1911, it was ordered dissolved by the federal government (United States vs. American Tobacco Company, 221 United States Reports, 106). Since the Ryan-Whitney syndicate was never completely trusted by the Wall Street banking houses it was essential, at a relatively early date, to secure control of some banks.
In 1898 Ryan and Whitney gained control of the State Trust Company, which was closely tied up with the American Surety Company. Its board of directors was changed and it was used as a source of loans as well as a bank of deposit for the Metropolitan. In 1900 one of the stockholders petitioned for an investigation, charging gross violations of the banking laws. One investigation was ended as soon as it was begun; another, by the state superintendent of banks, Frederick S. Kilburn, resulted in a report, on which no action was taken. The New York World, however, obtained and published a copy of the Kilburn report (Mar. 12, 1900). It implicated Ryan, Root, and others in the syndicate in attempts to use the funds of the trust and surety companies to cover up and facilitate the operations of the Metropolitan. Particular instances of loans, such as that for $100, 000 to the lobbyist Louis F. Payn, seemed to indicate that they were intended as concealed payments. There was a great scandal, and a bill was finally pushed through the state legislature amalgamating the State Trust Company with the Morton Trust Company, another Ryan venture; when the Morton Trust was in 1910 merged with the Guaranty Trust Company, Ryan took a prominent part in the latter.
In 1903 Ryan organized the National Bank of Commerce. In the same year he gained control of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, after ruthlessly breaking John Skelton Williams, who had originally organized it. In 1904 Ryan secured control of the Washington Life Insurance Company.
In 1905 he astounded the financial world by buying James Hazen Hyde's controlling block of shares in the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Ryan acquired stock that was normally worth $7, 500, 000 for $2, 500, 000, despite the fact that Harriman was willing to pay twice that sum. Harriman never forgave Ryan, and the incident was the beginning of a feud between them. Harriman "did not think that Ryan was a suitable man to have control of the Equitable, with its $400, 000, 000 of assets" (George Kennan, E. H. Harriman, 1922, vol. I, 413). Ryan's own statement of his motives in buying the stock ran in terms of a desire to save it from a receivership (North American Review, August 1913, pp. 163-64). The Armstrong legislative committee, investigating the insurance business in 1905, elicited from John Tatlock, Ryan's president of the Washington Life Insurance Company, the information that during 1905 Ryan invested several millions of its assets in the stock of his other properties, and had placed its deposits in his own banks. In the outcry that was raised when he bought the Hyde stock Ryan moved adroitly to place the voting power of the stock for five years in the hands of three trustees, including former President Cleveland. He placed Paul Morton, formerly of Theodore Roosevelt's cabinet, in the chairmanship of the company.
Perhaps the most glamorous of Ryan's ventures were his enterprises in the Congo. King Leopold of Belgium invited him to head a syndicate to reorganize financially and develop industrially his African properties. After a series of conferences between the two the Societe Internationale Forestiere et Miniere du Congo ("Forminiere") was organized, Ryan receiving for the promotion one-quarter of the stock. The original objective was rubber, but nothing much came of that, due to cheaper production costs in other fields. But diamond, gold, and copper mines were developed. Ryan said in an interview in June 1910, "I sleep like a baby. I don't remember ever having been in better health or spirits. I am interested not only in the industrial development of the Congo but also in its social and moral conditions" (Collier's, Dec. 30, 1911, p. 22).
In America his influence was considered in certain quarters far from moral. William Jennings Bryan and the silver Democrats attributed the nomination of Judge Alton B. Parker for the presidency in 1904 largely to Ryan's influence. In the 1912 convention of the Democratic party, to which Ryan was a delegate from Virginia, Bryan attacked Ryan and Belmont for coming "with their paid attorneys" to "seek secret counsel with the managers of this party, " and accused them of attempting to control the nominations (Proceedings, p. 131). He introduced and forced through a resolution by which the convention declared itself "opposed to the nomination of any candidate for president who is the representative of or under obligation to" Ryan, Belmont, or Morgan (Ibid. , p. 129).
After 1910 Ryan increasingly retired from the active management of his far-flung enterprises. His home was at 858 Fifth Avenue in New York City; a third of the block had been turned into a private garden containing expensive statuary. His collection of Limoges enamels was one of the finest in the world, and he had a magnificent collection of tapestries, bronzes, and other art objects. Ryan's benefactions and those of his first wife to the Catholic church were very extensive, amounting in all to about twenty million dollars. His estate, when he died, was estimated to be over two hundred million dollars.
Ryan was the founder of Metropolitan Traction Company. His most profitable investment was tobacco. He joined tobacco assets in 1898, forming The Union Tobacco Company and merged it with his greatest competitor, James Duke of North Carolina, forming the American Tobacco Company. Together Ryan and Duke developed the British-American Tobacco Company to protect American tobacco trade in Europe. Ryan was the greatest benefactor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond in the decades before the Great Depression. In addition to paying for schools, hospitals and other charitable works, Ryan's donations paid for the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, Virginia. Ryan also made significant donations to Catholic institutions in New York City and Washington, D. C.
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
(The auction catalog for the estate of Thomas Fortune Ryan...)
( About the Book Titles that are fiction anthologies are ...)
Ryan was married on November 25, 1873 to Ida Mary Barry. His first wife died on October 17, 1917. She had borne him five sons, of whom three survived him. On October 29, 1917, he was married to Mary Townsend (Nicoll) Lord Cuyler, a widow and the sister of De Lancey Nicoll.
