Unto the Sons (36 page)

In 1892, the year of Maria’s wedding in Maida, Lobianco’s cousins and their associates gradually began to disappear from their seaport jobs as bureaucrats, clerks, and other covering positions, because the Italian government was now embarking on a new campaign to harass and curb the livelihood of the troublemaking Socialists and anarchists. It was not the covert dealings in the migrant-worker travel market that stirred the government nearly so much as the labor strikes and raucous demonstrations that Socialist and anarchist leaders were fomenting throughout Italy—most frequently in such separatist cities as Naples and Palermo—against the miserable social conditions, the stagnant economy, and the nation’s imperialistic foreign policy in East Africa (Eritrea, Somaliland) that was summoning young Italian men into the army and increasing the already high rate of taxation. Even though the agitators had failed to politicize sufficiently the southern peasants to lure them away from their ties to the Church, it was not for a lack of trying. The government issued harsh prison sentences to those political antagonists whom it was able to capture and convict, and persistently pursued those others who remained in hiding in Italy rather than seek asylum in the United States—as Lobianco’s cousins did, moving into his already crowded boardinghouse near the asbestos factory site in Ambler, Pennsylvania, seventeen miles north of Philadelphia. While Gaetano had never played an active role in subversive activity in Italy or the United States, his acquaintanceship with many Italians who did, and who remained his friends, was enough to keep him away from Maida and his sister’s wedding.

17.

T
he grandeur and opportunity of America was personified to Gaetano each day by the decorous appearance at the job site of his sponsor and boss, Dr. Richard V. Mattison, a tall, bewhiskered, nonpracticing Philadelphia physician who had elevated himself from humble origins as a barefoot farm boy in nearby Bucks County to make a fortune manufacturing pharmaceutical concoctions that reputedly cured myriad physical ailments and disorders as well as certain maladies of the spirit. Of him it was said by a longtime medical associate: “Dr. Mattison was not always right, but he was never in doubt.”

A scholarship student at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Dr. Mattison in 1873 opened a modest laboratory along the city’s waterfront, and, financed by a wealthy young partner who had been his classmate at pharmacy college, he experimented with various compounds and elixirs that before the end of the decade would be blended and contained within thousands of small, varicolored baroque bottles and sold as over-the-counter cures in apothecaries around the nation and in such foreign cities as London, Paris, Lucerne, and Rome.

Dr. Mattison’s Bromo Caffeine—advertised as a palliative for the frayed nerves of “the neurasthenic woman or the congestive or anaemic headaches of the fin de siecle man”—was the most famous of his curatives; but nearly as popular was his Alkalithia for rheumatism, and his Cafetonique for dyspepsia.

Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, in 1881, while he was in his laboratory testing one of his remedies that contained milk of magnesia, it was reported that he accidentally spilled some of the solution on a hot pipe, where he soon noticed that it clung steadfastly to the metal—alerting him to the insulating properties within magnesium carbonate and prompting his subsequent experiments with magnesia, asbestos, and other substances to create eventually insulation cloth that could be wrapped around steam pipes in homes to reduce fuel costs greatly.

This departure from his preoccupation with pharmaceutical preparations gradually led Dr. Mattison to an entirely new career, one in which he would manufacture not only insulation materials but also a brand of
fabric and millboard that was fireproof and could be used in construction materials to increase the safety of private homes, workshops, and schools. As a result of his desire to specialize in fireproof products, Dr. Mattison became increasingly dependent on the use of asbestos, an unburnable, often whitish substance found in the crystallized veins of certain rock formations of volcanic origin in many parts of Africa, as well as in Canada, Russia, China, Australia, and Italy. In its most valuable condition, asbestos is a silky, unctuous, thread-thin fiber two or three inches in length, with the tensile strength of steel wire and flexible enough to be spun with cotton or flax to form yarn that is resistant to heat and repellent to fire. Asbestos fibers that are too short for spinning can be ground up and mixed with cement to be made into incombustible roof shingles, wallboards, and floor tiles.

In ancient times, asbestos was commonly referred to as “the magic mineral.” The Emperor Charlemagne was known to have enjoyed duping his visitors occasionally by tossing his asbestos tablecloth into a fire and then pulling it out, unburnt by the flames; and medieval conjurers wearing hooded robes made of cotton blended with asbestos were able guilefully to exhibit their flame-thwarting talents before astonished crowds of naive spectators. In the pre-Christian era the Greeks and Romans covered the bodies of their dead leaders with asbestos shrouds during cremation ceremonies. But the widespread use of this always rare and costly mineral was not possible until the discovery of huge deposits of it in Quebec during the 1870s.

First British industrialists became its major consumers, then such Americans as Henry Ward Johns (whose company was the forerunner of Johns-Manville); but no less active, beginning in the early 1880s, was Dr. Mattison, who, as he continued to experiment with asbestos in his laboratory, became almost obsessed with the mineral’s wondrous and profitable possibilities. And he also saw himself as one day heading a giant firm that mass-produced asbestos items on a national or even international scale—fireproof asbestos curtains for theaters, asbestos uniforms for firemen, asbestos linings for kitchen ovens and factory kilns, asbestos gloves for foundry workers and bakers, asbestos conveyer belts to bear smoldering objects, asbestos toasters and iron holders, asbestos knobs on radiator valves, asbestos awnings over the porches of summer homes.

But before he could venture into the business so grandly, he first had to build a manufacturing plant equal in size to his ambitions—meaning that he had to vacate his modest quarters in Philadelphia and relocate
somewhere in the expansive Pennsylvania countryside. His multimillionaire partner, Henry G. Keasbey, a mild-mannered individual who considered Dr. Mattison a genius and rarely took issue with him, accompanied him on weekend carriage rides outside the city to explore stretches of farmland that might be quickly adaptable for industrial development. Wearing dark suits and bowlers, and carrying walking sticks as they stepped in and out of the cow dung in weedy pastures, the two men represented an odd sight to the dairy workers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights who stood quietly observing from the sides of dirt roads that had not been widened since William Penn himself had claimed the territory in the 1680s for his fellow English Quaker immigrants, at the expense of the eased-out Indians.

At six feet, four inches, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and such disproportionately long, thin legs that he seemed to be walking on stilts, the sternly spectacled Dr. Mattison towered over the five-foot-seven-inch Mr. Keasbey, who had a round ruddy face and muttonchop whiskers and nodded affirmatively at nearly everything he heard the talkative doctor say. Bystanders could have justifiably assumed that Dr. Mattison, and not Mr. Keasbey, was the scion of a powerful family of Anglo-Americans who had been social leaders and philanthropists for generations, and who decorated their grand residences in Morris County, New Jersey, with mounted moose heads over the mantels, and burnished medieval-style breastplates flanking the staircases beneath staffs of jousting banners and suspended battle-axes. In deference to Keasbey’s wealth, and with the understanding that he would continue to underwrite his aspirations, Dr. Mattison placed Keasbey’s name in the primary position on their joint enterprise. It was called Keasbey & Mattison Company.

On one of their weekend excursions into the countryside in 1882, the partners came upon a 408-acre spread of land that had been called Wissahickon by the Indians but was now a declining village of obsolete gristmills and small farms, called Ambler. The most newsworthy happening in Ambler history had been a long-ago train wreck, in 1856, a year after the Pennsylvania Railroad had ceremoniously introduced trains to this part of the state. The first rescuer to arrive at the disaster was a tiny Quaker woman named Mary Ambler, the widowed mother of nine, who came in a buggy packed with her petticoats and bedsheets, which she would soon tear into bandages after pulling as many bodies as she could from the flames. Twelve years later, months after Mary Ambler’s death in 1868, some of the passengers she rescued attended a dedication ceremony in
which the railroad company renamed its Wissahickon station in honor of Mary Ambler. In 1869 the village of Wissahickon also changed its name to Ambler.

When Dr. Mattison and Mr. Keasbey first visited Ambler in 1882, it had a decreasing population of fewer than three hundred, and several large plots of land and vacated mills for sale at low prices in the vicinity of the railroad tracks. The railroad that had been heralded as an economic stimulant to the village had become instead its financial nemesis. Farmers who had once lined the roads into Ambler with their horsecarts filled with grain to be ground by Ambler’s millers could now more conveniently load their unground grain onto freight trains and send it directly to large urban food distributors that provided their own grinding service. Since milling had long been the sole industry in Ambler—in the mid-1800s the town had seven gristmills, a sawmill, and a silk and fulling mill—the influence of the railroad was profound. By 1880 the mills, which in some cases had existed for two hundred years, and which during the Revolutionary War had supplied food, clothing, and firewood to General George Washington’s nearby military encampments, were either bankrupt or operating unprofitably. Ambler’s antiquated sawmill was similarly affected by the changing conditions, and the silk and fulling mill—which had once kept dozens of looms busy with wool weavers making fringed shawls for women around the nation—was additionally victimized during the 1870s, when the fringed shawl gradually went out of fashion. Large quantities of these unsold garments were stored for years by one of the owners of the mill, a wool and silk importer in New York City named Eberhard Flues; and after his death in 1896 his surviving partners donated some of the shawls, still in good condition, to Admiral Robert E. Peary when the latter announced plans for his first expedition to the North Pole.

But when Dr. Mattison rode past the abandoned grounds of Ambler’s once popular county fair, having earlier seen the defunct mills and other examples of a village in decline, he did not pause to reflect on his decision to make this his home and the locale of his ambitious enterprise. On the contrary, he was pleased by Ambler’s weakened condition—it was now malleable for his remaking. Its economy was stagnant, but its strong and abundant streams of pure spring water that had once powered the mills would flow ideally through his chemicals, mixing more predictably with his concoctions than had the waters of Philadelphia’s polluted river. The railroad could swiftly and regularly carry tons of asbestos into Ambler from the big mines in Quebec. The limestone in Ambler’s surrounding
hills could be quarried to form factories along the tracks, convenient for the receipt of raw materials and the delivery of finished products. Dr. Mattison and his partner could pave the wide dirt road that cut through the center of town, perpendicular to the tracks, and they could also brighten all the village routes and walkways with electric streetlamps. They could loan money to the village businessmen for the renovation and repainting of the weatherworn buildings in the vicinity of the train station—the general store, the barbershop, the carriage repair shop, the rooming house, and the corner apothecary that (Dr. Mattison was pleased to observe) was well stocked with bottles of Bromo Caffeine.

Dr. Mattison and his partner would surely need more than one architect to design all the new buildings that were planned—not only the factories but also the domestic residences for the workers, the foremen, the top executives and chemists who would be employed by Keasbey & Mattison. These dwellings would not be the common clapboard bungalows or shantytown rows that characterized most company towns in the United States; they would instead be thick-walled, enduring structures of stone bedecked with the special features and ornamentation that appealed to the doctor’s aesthetic sensibilities. Dr. Mattison had always been enamored of Gothic architecture. During the previous summer he had become more enraptured by it than ever as he toured western Germany and looked upon the conical turrets, finials, and dormer windows of Rhineland mansions, which reawakened in him a responsiveness that he had first felt as a young boy while staring at the Hänsel and Gretel illustrations in a book that his teacher had passed among the students in the one-room Bucks County schoolhouse. He had often dreamed after that of living in a turreted mansion, and he freely revealed that fantasy to his fellow students in a paper he read in English class. And now in Ambler two decades later, as he was about to transform an agricultural community into an industrial mecca—following his own route from farm boy to magnate—his youthful dreams were taking a realistic shape, thanks to his deep thinking and to Mr. Keasbey’s deep pockets.

This was an era of unlimited possibilities across America. Industrialists of vision and determination were converting raw materials and raw energy into gold and were living like kings—residing in mansions, and even castles, while ruling over masses of people and vast factories with an audaciousness, and at times a gallantry, that was unprecedented in American history. Dr. Mattison had read about some of these men—J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, George Pullman, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, the late Cornelius Vanderbilt. And new men were on the
horizon—William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford, and dozens more. Fortunes had been made, and would continue to be made, in an astonishing variety of ways; and now Dr. Mattison saw his chance, in this age of steam, through insulating the nation’s pipes and boilers, from its household basements to its battleships, and through fireproofing thousands of its private and public buildings with his Ambler-made shingles and siding encrusted with the asbestos fibers that the ancients believed were magic.