Business & Finance: Death of Ryan

With a Baltimore store, Thomas Fortune Ryan went to work as an errand-boy for $3 a week; with William Collins Whitney he was a broker in Wall Street; with King Leopold II of Belgium he developed the diamond fields of the Congo Free State; and with a fortune estimated between one and five hundred million dollars, last week, he died.

The phrase, “in conference,” to most people, educated by comic strips, signifies: “out playing golf,” or “unfit to receive callers.” Actually, of course, it means something else. It can be seen that the life of Thomas Fortune Ryan was, in its most important aspects, a succession of meetings with other men, an endless series of discussions and conversations, held in big, gloomy rooms, over lunch tables, or on street corners in Wall Street 40 years ago. Each of these conferences had its own specific results; as far as Thomas Fortune Ryan was concerned, the result was often an addition, large or small, to his personal wealth, and an addition to the number of enterprises which he controlled.

It was no coincidence that the other participants in Thomas Fortune Ryan’s conferences were usually important men. He served few masters but he had many partners, and it is for the number and the importance of these, for the variety of his interests more than their magnitude, that Thomas Fortune Ryan was a unique figure in U. S. finance.

William Collins Whitney was his tutor in Wall Street and the first of his grand associates. At the time when Manhattan light and transit interests were consolidated, he became the ally of Jay Gould, Samuel J. Tilden, P. A. B. Widener, and had as counsel, Paul Drenner Cravath and Elihu Root. He helped elect a Mayor of New York, and did more than anyone else to secure President Cleveland a second term in the White House. He fought the Seaboard Air Line Railway until he beat it and he helped launch the Southern Railway. In one of his most notable financial prodigies, the organization of the American Tobacco Co., with which he gained a two-thirds interest in the foreign market, he was comparatively alone. King Leopold II asked him for help in exploiting African diamond mines; and in rooms where chandeliers sparkled dimly like uncut diamonds, Thomas Fortune Ryan sat and talked with Harry Payne Whitney, Daniel Guggenheim and John Hays Hammond, persuading them to share this spectacular venture.

Politically, Thomas Fortune Ryan was an ardent, though a self-effacing Democrat, and his death is the most notable one which has been rumored to be in part the result of Governor Smith’s defeat. Like many great makers of money, he discovered, late in life, an interest in pictures. His first wife, who died in 1917, was made a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope; in 1920 his son, Allan Ryan, cornered the stock of Stutz Motor Car Co., and was expelled from the Stock Exchange for doing so. Thomas Fortune Ryan tried several times to retire from business but until last week he called frequently at the office he maintained in Manhattan, at the Guaranty Trust Co. It was said of him that he “could have been the richest man in the U. S.” He lived in Manhattan and at “Oak Ridge” on the site of his birthplace* in Nelson County, Virginia; and the middle name, which might have been his motto, was given him by his parents who died when he was five years old.

He was buried in the Sacred Heart Cathedral, in Richmond, which he had given to the city.

* His father was overseer at Oak Ridge, owned then by a Mr. Rives. Thomas Ryan, like his father, was a laborer at Oak Ridge; but when he left, he said to his employer, “I will come back to buy you out,” and later did so.