Franklin B. Gowen - Life After The Railroad

Life After The Railroad

As previously mentioned, even while presidenting one of the major corporations of his time, Franklin Gowen never completely gave up the practice of law. The highest visibility instance of this was his celebrated—and also decried—participation in the Molly Maguire prosecutions. Another notable instance was during the run up to the Reading's May 1880 bankruptcy: in March Gowen was in Harrisburg prosecuting bribery cases on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania, growing out of the state's Railroad Riots Act investigations, and from Gowen's perspective an extension of his ongoing legal wranglings against the allied activities of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Standard Oil. To the very tragic end of Gowen's life this battle, which appears to have held for him meta-significance beyond mere competition between railroads, was a cause to which he devoted much energy.

It is also important to note here that during Gowen's presidency of the Reading Railroad, he also had a history of involvement in civic matters. He had been a Democratic representative to the state constitutional convention in 1873 and had been a board of governors member of the Philadelphia Reform Club. As well, also in the run up to the railroad's 1880 bankruptcy, he had lent his name in support of one side of a fight for control of the state Democratic convention. At another point in time during his presidency his name was even rumored as a possible Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania governor, though nothing ever came of it.

In his forced retirement from the active affairs of the Reading, Gowen spent time composing limericks and also translating German poetry. Involvement with literature was not new to him—recall his founding role in the Pottsville Literary Society decades before; and he was well versed enough in the stage to include lengthy descriptions of two plays in his speech at one of the Molly Maguire trials.

Despite the enforced peace introduced by J.P. Morgan among formerly cutthroat competing railroads, Gowen found opportunity to wage legal war against his old enemies, the Standard Oil and Pennsylvania Railroad, before the then new Interstate Commerce Commission (the ICC). Early in 1889—the last year of his life—Gowen also found himself in the odd position of representing an old friend, Eckley B. Coxe, in a suit before the ICC against, essentially, the same coal monopoly that Gowen himself had forged more than a decade before.

The specifics of the days and hours leading up to Gowen's death on Friday, December 13, 1889, are open to some contention, but the following represents the generally accepted sequence:

Shortly before his death, many of Gowen's friends and associates noticed a change in his overall mood. They remarked upon his more somber demeanor and noted that for a trip home to Philadelphia, he had boarded the wrong train. Gowen wrote to his insurance agent on December 9, 1889, to ask if he could cash in his $90,000 life insurance policy. Three days later, after he had arrived in Washington, DC, to argue a case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, Gowen purchased a revolver at a hardware store on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Franklin Gowen died of a gunshot wound on Friday, December 13, 1889, at Wormley's Hotel in Washington, DC. Some speculated that his death was the result of action by the apocryphal Molly Maguires in retaliation for his earlier activities against them. However, the Gowen family hired Captain Robert Linden of the Pinkerton Agency to investigate. Linden had been the senior Pinkerton involved in the Reading Railroad-arranged and -financed infiltration of the secret organization, and he was thus considered a most qualified person to determine if there were any connection of that sort. Linden ruled out a Molly connection very quickly.

The owner of Wolford's Hardware Store on Pennsylvania Avenue came forward to identify Gowen as the man who had bought a pistol the day before. Conspiracy theories about assassins and impersonations were put aside when the Gowen family reported that he had been "acting queerly for some time and that there was a strain of hereditary insanity in his family."

Questions remain and are still debated to this day regarding the nature of Gowen's final demise. For instance, the shot to the head from which Gowen died was from an angle very unlikely to have been self-inflicted, and the death site was interfered with before any investigation was able to be undertaken or the body removed to the morgue. Nonetheless, the coroner ruled the death a suicide, and thus it remains in official records—unlikely to be changed at this late date.

Ultimate evaluations of Franklin Benjamin Gowen's life are far beyond the scope of this article. However, assessments of his role in the life of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, from a historian of the railroad, seem appropriate here as summations:

"Simply put, turn the company from one of economic conservatism to daring adventurism. Every aspect of the 's existence was to be enervated and agitated and sometimes turned topsy-turvy during the Gowen years of the 1870s and 1880s."

"The few scraps of letters and memoranda from Gowen that shed some light on this seem to indicate that he was impatient, even bored, when details of real railroading practices came to his attention. It was corporate power and financial finagling that interested this complex man. . . . Gowen's financial rewards were meager, and while he did attain considerable public attention and the trappings of his office, this dynamic leader ultimately was consumed by his final failure and his career ended in tragedy."

The record of Gowen's Reading Railroad presidency sheds light not only on the history of one iconic business endeavor, but upon a complex set of interrelated industrial endeavors—coal, rail and iron/steel—at the heart of America's Industrial Revolution.