Business & Finance: Clement for Atterbury

One day last July after a long session at Pennsylvania R. R.’s general offices in Philadelphia, President William Wallace Atterbury hopped into an automobile to keep an appointment at a suburban hospital. There he underwent a cholelithotomy (removal of gallstones), and for the next few months Mr. Atterbury disappeared from the news, except for persistent reports that he was dying. Certainly he was not at his office. Late last autumn he put his yacht Arminia into Miami, summoned newshawks aboard. “I’m the livest, kickingest person you ever saw,” he fumed. “I haven’t felt so well since last July.”

Mr. Atterbury’s convalescence dragged on, complicated by severe neuritis. He even missed Pennsylvania’s annual meeting last month. Last week he attended his first directors’ meeting in a nine-month, and then only to nominate his successor. Bowing to Mr. Atterbury’s desire to retire, the directors elected, as Pennsylvania’s tenth ruler, Martin Withington Clement, vice president and active head of the $2,000,000,000 system during Mr. Atterbury’s long absence.

Under Pennsy’s strict rules Mr. Atterbury would have had to retire anyway next January, when he will be 70. The first five years of his management were the last five years of the post-War boom. Like other railroad men of that era, he tossed about his railroad’s millions in the great game of trading, for “strategic” reasons, in control of other lines. Pennsylvania’s investments in Lehigh Valley and Wabash alone cost $106,000,000. At today’s prices those holdings are worth about $4,000,000⊕ Mr. Atterbury’s personal memorial, however, is not a stack of securities but Pennsylvania’s $270,000,000 improvement and electrification program carried out in his last five years—five years of Depression. Electrification of the main line from New York through to Washington will save the road $7,250.000 annually. An even more impressive memorial is the fact that Pennsylvania was one of the few U. S. carriers that was never in the red any year after 1929.

According to Mr. Atterbury, the new head of the self-styled Standard Railroad of the World is “unquestionably the ablest railroad executive in the country.” Martin Withington Clement, born 53 years ago in Sunbury, Pa., is one of the youngest presidents Pennsy ever had. He started with the road as a rodman in 1901 after graduating from Trinity College, trod the traditional path of railroad promotion until 1926 when he was made vice president in charge of operations. At that time and for years afterwards Mr. Atterbury’s logical successor appeared to be his famed Vice President Elisha Lee. But 3 year and a half ago Mr. Lee dropped dead in Manhattan and Mr. Clement became heir-apparent to the biggest railroad job in the U. S.

During the War, Mr. Atterbury became General Atterbury as chief railroad officer in France. President Clement was never more than a National Guard captain but his military traditions are as strong as his predecessor’s. His father, the late Major General Charles M. Clement, was once commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard. His grandfather was also a general in the State militia, his great-grandfather a sergeant-major in the War of 1812.

A genial six-footer with an easy manner and the shoulders of a shop foreman, President Clement commutes to Philadelphia from his home in suburban Haverford, where he putters in his garden, trying to grow “things that the neighbors can’t raise.” To close friends and fellow officers, he is always “Clem.” He reads two or three Westerns a month, says: “I like them with plenty of blood & thunder.”

After moving into the president’s walnut-paneled office last week, his first duty was to receive the Press, which found him far easier to interview than crisp old Mr. Atterbury. For an hour, without even blinking at the photoflashes, he swapped remarks with newshawks on every subject except politics. Said he, sharp for once: “The Pennsylvania is not in politics . . . I’m not in politics.”

Philadelphians guessed that what President Clement really meant was that he intended “to take the Pennsy out of politics” —where it has been for nearly a century. No stancher Pennsylvania Republican ever lived than the onetime G. O. P. National Committeeman, William Wallace Atterbury. And nervous indeed were Pennsylvania Republicans last week; it was already reported that a contracting company with political ties had been turned down on a big Pennsy job, traditionally its own.

* Furthered but not originated by Mr. Atterbury was Pennsylvania’s policy of buying into the two leading New England systems—New York, New Haven & Hartford and Boston & Maine—both of which, for all practical railroading purposes, are now Pennsy affiliates. Long a sore subject in New England politics, Pennsy’s grip on New England traffic is periodically protested by certain New England shippers. Last week the six New England Governors met at Hartford, Conn, to ponder a new scheme for weakening Pennsy’s dominance. They would have the New England lines administered as two competitive systems under a joint board of trustees.