Invisible Giants: The Empires of Cleveland's Van Sweringen Brothers

Sources and Acknowledgments

Sources and Acknowledgments • 333 Sources and Acknowledgments Any Van Sweringen biographer faces a daunting job. If nothing else, this work attests to the brothers’ absolute fixation on both personal and business privacy. Their associates and office staff were specifically chosen to be close-mouthed, and their public relations people were steeped in the philosophy that the best publicity is no publicity. When public statements were necessary, reporters and writers seldom got much more than carefully crafted quotes designed to achieve a specific purpose and mention nothing else. Thus, numerous semi-truths and a few pure fabrications helped create an enduring and confusing Van Sweringen mythology. Furthermore, they left no journals or diaries and, beyond formal business communications, no personal letters of consequence . Without wives and children, they also left no family records or intimate memories. Indeed, few people in their home city of Cleveland could claim to know them. As just noted, their closest associates and employees were circumspect in the extreme during the brothers’ lifetimes, and most remained so after their deaths—partly out of admiration for them and probably partly because of sensitivity to the many attacks which came during the last years. As a result, the Van Sweringen story has heavy doses of speculation, hearsay, and legend. Fortunately for posterity—although it was traumatic at the time—the New Deal’s zeal to root out the alleged business villains deemed responsible for the crash and the depression had some positive benefits. Several congressional committees looked into the Van Sweringens’ operations, most particularly a wide-ranging Senate investigation begun in 1936 by Burton K. Wheeler’s Committee on Interstate Commerce (which included Senator Harry S Truman and his future vice president, Alben W. Barkley). This effort delved as deeply as possible 334 • Sources and Acknowledgments into the Van Sweringens’ entire business career, concentrating primarily on their railroad and railroad-related ventures, which most directly interested the committee. At the same time, this committee also investigated the general railroad consolidation power struggles of the 1920s and early 1930s, in which the Van Sweringens played a major part. The result was a thorough, detailed, and extensively documented report, backed up by many volumes of testimony and numerous original documents. Without the Wheeler Committee ’s work, it would be impossible to tell the Van Sweringen story. It must be viewed with some caution, however, since it was obviously adversarial and also came too late to have more than nominal input from O. P. Van Sweringen himself, who died shortly before the formal hearings began. By then, too, M. J. was gone, as were John Bernet, A. H. Smith, and several other key people in the Van Sweringen careers. But with that caveat, the Wheeler Committee records and report inevitably form the backbone of this work—as they have all other Van Sweringen studies, published and unpublished. Aside from the rather sparse published works, two extensive Van Sweringen biographies exist in manuscript form. The most detailed and interesting was done by Raymond F. Blosser in the mid-1940s. Between 1935 and 1944 Blosser was, successively , staff write and head of the Associated Press’s Cleveland bureau; he subsequently headed the press relations departments of the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the New York Central. Although his work is, sadly, undocumented, he apparently was able to interview numerous people who had been associated with the Van Sweringens in one form or another . In 1946, he completed a second draft, which was later reviewed and annotated by William H. Wenneman and other close Van Sweringen associates. Wenneman began work in the Van Sweringen offices in 1918, served as O. P. Van Sweringen ’s private secretary during the 1930s, and subsequently became vice president of finance of the Nickel Plate; his commentary on the Blosser draft corrects many points and adds a considerable amount of personal insight from this period. The Blosser material is currently in the collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland. The second work, by Virginia Taylor Hampton (who wrote under the name of Taylor Hampton), is essentially an expanded version of a biography published in serialized form in the Cleveland News in 1955. Although the manuscript is dated 1965, it is undoubtedly a later version of the manuscript upon which the Cleveland News articles were based. Mrs. Hampton was the wife of H. Horton Hampton, a close friend Sources and Acknowledgments • 335 and real estate associate...