Thomas Fortune Ryan

• Born: October 17, 1851
• Birthplace: Lovingston, Virginia
• Died: November 23, 1928
• Place of death: New York, New York

American investor and financier

Ryan combined charisma, opportunism, intuitive business savvy, a keen instinct for profit potential, and ruthless competitiveness to become one of the dominant financiers in the Gilded Age. He created a financial empire with unprecedented reach into numerous enterprises, domestic and international, most prominently public transportation and tobacco.

Sources of wealth: Transportation systems; investments; trade

Bequeathal of wealth: Church

Early Life

Thomas Fortune Ryan (RI-uhn) was born in modest circumstances in the rugged foothills of the Piedmont, where there were few public records. When he became one of the titans of the Gilded Age, Ryan would zealously protect his private life from public scrutiny. For these reasons, very little is known about his childhood. His father, a tailor who also ran a small wayside inn catering to the Charlottesville-Richmond merchant traffic, remarried after Ryan’s mother died when the boy was five years old. The family moved to the new wife’s family plantation in Tennessee. Although still an adolescent, Ryan involved himself in plantation management, forsaking formal college study and impatient with the impracticality of book learning. After the Civil War dramatically altered economic conditions in the South, Ryan, with his family’s blessing, headed north in 1868 to the nearest large city, Baltimore, with a little more than $100 and a letter of introduction for a position as a clerk in a highly successful dry goods business.

First Ventures

Historians are uncertain about what happened to Ryan at this point in his life. What is indisputable is that during the long train ride to Baltimore, Ryan, a Protestant educated by Baptists, accepted Catholicism. According to some accounts, he converted after engaging in emotional theological discussions with the train’s conductor. Other historians suggest a far more practical motive: Ryan, already an opportunist with savvy instincts, understood that any success in Baltimore, at the time America’s largest Catholic city, would necessitate his conversion.

Ambitious and restless, Ryan within four years relocated to New York City, where he accepted a position as a brokerage assistant on Wall Street. Amid the wheeling and dealing, he demonstrated a keen financial sense. He wed the Catholic daughter of the dry goods merchant, and with her family’s financial backing he purchased a seat on the prestigious New York Stock Exchange when he was twenty-three, making him the youngest member in the history of the exchange. However, it was Ryan’s calculated move into the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine that put him in the position to make his first major move. In 1886, after bidding to construct a significant portion of the city’s new cable railroad service and being out-bribed by competitors, Ryan established the Metropolitan Traction Company and controlled the prime tracks that served Broadway. Within eight years, through bribery and cutthroat competitive practices, he controlled the majority of the city’s electric streetcar service.

His wealth growing exponentially, Ryan turned to aggressive investment opportunities, notably an ambitious challenge to James Buchanan Duke’s tobacco empire through Ryan’s financial support of the rival Union Tobacco Company. When Duke himself recognized Ryan’s business savvy and realized the catastrophe of a price war, he proposed a merger of his company and Ryan’s, forming the American Tobacco Company in 1899, which quickly became the dominant force in international tobacco sales.

Mature Wealth

Across the next two decades, Ryan continued to define himself as one of the most formidable business minds of his era. He made fortunes by investing in more than twenty-five corporations, displaying a business acumen in fields as diverse as coal and diamond mining, banking, public utilities, and railroads. Along with Jay Gould, David Guggenheim, and Harry Payne Whitney, Ryan embodied the spirit of venture capitalism at the turn of the century. While other investors found the sturdy flatbed typewriter designed for the fledgling Royal Typewriter Company to be plain and uninspiring, Ryan recognized the advantages of this design. He invested in a controlling interest of the firm’s initial stock and briefly served as president of the company. A career Democrat, Ryan wielded massive influence in New York politics, and he supported the resurgence of Grover Cleveland and his return to the presidency in 1885.

Not all of his business transactions were successful. Against the growing popularity of the Manhattan subway system, he attempted a disastrous merger with a rival streetcar company and in the process lost nearly $35 million and was investigated for misappropriation of public bond money. In 1905, he made an ill-advised purchase of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. His move into the insurance business, about which Ryan knew little, was criticized as being indefensibly self-aggrandizing and motivated solely by greed, and it did not help that Equitable had a reputation for neglect of the poor and for ruthless settlement practices. This negative public opinion compelled Ryan to back out of the insurance business within four years.

Ryan earned a reputation for competitive, mercenary capitalism and ostentatious living at his Fifth Avenue town house, as well as at Oak Ridge, his five-thousand-acre estate in Virginia. However, his wife, Ida Barry Ryan, emerged as a champion of Catholic charities in New York City, donating large sums of money to both churches and church-run hospitals. In 1909 the Ryans contributed more than $600,000, making them the major donors for the elegant Italian Renaissance-style St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church on fashionable Lexington Avenue.

Although this generosity was lauded, the Catholic community in New York City was large, and its own financial resources were considerable. When the Ryan family relocated to Oak Ridge at the turn of the century, Ida faced a much different circumstance. The Catholic community in the Protestant South, while steadily growing, lacked the congregational support to undertake the ambitious building program that the church needed. Ida donated considerable sums to assist the Richmond, Virginia, Catholic diocese in constructing new churches to attract the nouveau riche of the Gilded Age and to renovate churches that still bore structural damage from the Civil War. Ryan’s money financed the construction of seminary facilities, as well as Catholic elementary and secondary schools. However, it is the unprecedented commitment, made in 1901, to finance the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond with which the Ryan fortune is most associated. The pope recognized Ida’s philanthropic efforts by making her a countess of the Holy Roman Empire.

Despite the publicity about his works of charity for the church, Ryan in his sixties became the subject of public scandal. He grew estranged from his wife over her increasing devotion to the church, as well as her immense weight gain (she weighed more than three hundred pounds), and her preference for living at the family’s estate in upstate New York. Ryan sought the very public company of Mary Townsend Lord Cuyler, a wealthy widow. When Ida died on Ryan’s sixty-sixth birthday, she was not interred in the crypt she had designed in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart but was buried far away in Hyde Park, New York. Less than two weeks later, Ryan married Cuyler. His eldest son publicly decried the marriage. When Ryan died in 1928, leaving an estate valued at close to $1.5 billion (adjusted for inflation), he left his son only a set of pearl shirt studs. Ryan himself was buried, along with his second wife, on the grounds of Oak Ridge.

Legacy

Thomas Fortune Ryan came from modest beginnings, but with his appetite for acquisition and his passion for the competitiveness of venture capitalism he created an international financial empire that made him, at his death, the wealthiest man the South had ever produced. His legacy, however, is problematic. He invented nothing, no twenty-first century company bears his name, and he did not use his wealth to establish a charity foundation or to endow a university or hospital system. Nor did his family continue his legacy; his fortune was quietly distributed among his descendants, who held a variety of occupations.

Ryan simply made money. He had a lifelong penchant for building ostentatious homes and acquiring contemporary European art, particularly sculpture, and he commissioned Auguste Rodin to sculpt no fewer than three busts of himself. Despite his indulgences, Ryan resolutely maintained his fortune, except for the almost $20 million (adjusted for inflation) that he donated to the Catholic Church. Although fabulously wealthy in his time, in the twenty-first century Ryan is largely forgotten among the more prominent financiers of the American Gilded Age.

Bibliography

Brands, H. W. The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890’s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Cultural history of Ryan’s era. Stresses the impact of venture capitalism and the boom/bust economics of the age of entrepreneurship. Includes an account of Ryan’s ambitious takeover of New York City’s public transit.

Fogarty, Gerald. Commonwealth Catholicism: A History of the Catholic Church in Virginia. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Cultural history of the rise of Catholicism in the Protestant South. Includes the history of the Ryan family and its impact in Richmond. Features illustrations.

Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. New York: Holt, 2006. Important revisionist reading of the Gilded Age financiers that focuses less on the morality of their ambitions and more on the groundbreaking economic theories they created.

Schlereth, Thomas J. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915. New York: Harper, 1992. Accessible, highly readable anecdotal history of Ryan’s era that focuses on the impact of the working class on America’s new superrich.