Our Railroads To-Morrow
by Edward Hungerford · English · Gutenberg #39838 · 680,415 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Our Railroads To-Morrow
Author: Edward Hungerford
Release date: May 28, 2012 [eBook #39838]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR RAILROADS TO-MORROW ***
Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive.)
OUR RAILROADS TO-MORROW
OUR RAILROADS TO-MORROW
BY EDWARD HUNGERFORD
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
THE CENTURY CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921, 1922, BY
CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I IN INTRODUCTION 3
II THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION 25
III THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION (continued) 47
IV THE RETURN OF PRIVATE OPERATION 65
V THE PRESENT-DAY SITUATION 79
VI THE MAN FACTOR OF THE PROBLEM 91
VII SOLVING THE RAILROADS' HUMAN PROBLEM 115
VIII THE POSSIBILITIES OF ELECTRIFICATION 135
IX MORE ABOUT ELECTRIC MOTIVE-POWER 159
X A CASE FOR THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE 172
XI THE GASOLINE-MOTOR UNIT AND ITS POSSIBILITIES 191
XII SPEEDING UP THE FREIGHT TERMINALS 213
XIII THE TWILIGHT OF COMPETITION 238
XIV THE REGIONAL RAILROAD OVERSEAS 272
XV THE REGIONAL RAILROAD AT HOME 293
XVI THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD 317
OUR RAILROADS TO-MORROW
CHAPTER I
IN INTRODUCTION
Do you chance to recall the story of Frankenstein, of the man-made
monster, who, having been created, arose to slay the man who had created
him? The railroad to-day is in much the position of the man who created
the Frankenstein. Having in no small sense created the modern world,
having riveted its very sinews of commerce together, it now stands in
apparent danger of collapse. The world over, it is at least in peril of
bankruptcy. Everywhere it is in trouble. One of the greatest if not indeed
the greatest of factors in our social and commercial structure to-day is
flying the signals of distress. Its perplexities are upon all tongues.
Their solution seemingly has become the problem of all men. The railroad
is almost the single great unsolved economic problem of the entire world
to-day.
The sweep of a great war, the debris of men and of human understanding
that followed in its wake, the new and independent position of labor
everywhere, the vast increases in fuel and in raw material costs--all have
contributed to the serious embarrassment of our railroads. But never to
their breakdown. Please remember this. It is a common phrase these days to
allude to "the breakdown of the railroads." But it is an incorrect phrase,
decidedly incorrect.
Even in Russia, where transport conditions to-day are the worst anywhere
in the world, there has not been a complete railroad breakdown. The
Russian railroads after nearly a decade of overburden are to-day
functioning--after a miserable fashion, to be sure, but functioning none
the less.
For, truth to tell, a necessary railroad structure may never break down
completely. It may descend into the valley of deep woes, it may crawl on
its stomach in the despair of seemingly hopeless disease, but it may never
quite die. That is out of the possibilities of the thing. Dying, a
railroad dying? It must never die. A factory, a merchandising
establishment, even a whole town may struggle along fitfully for a number
of years and then decide to quit, leaving but a forlorn group of ruins as
a memento of vanished enterprise. But a necessary railroad may never quit.
When a rail highway of any real importance ceases to operate, civilization
itself, begins to crumble. For a railroad is a not alone life but also a
life-giver. Upon it depends virtually all the life of the community it
serves, not merely commercial life but political and social as well. Which
means that the mere suggestion that the railroad structure should cease to
function is unthinkable. And here thrusts to the front the vexing problem
of how not only to enable it merely to live but to enable it to live in
the fullest strength, to grow apace withal, to more than keep pace with
the growth of the community that it is designed to serve.
* * * * *
For nearly a hundred years now we have been upbuilding the railroad
structure of the world. America pioneered in its creation. Our fathers and
our fathers' fathers cannot now remember the day when the call of the iron
horse was not heard across the land. The railroad train has become part
and parcel of our lives. And even though in these days with our motor cars
at the curb we may have come to scorn the railroad train for our own short
travels, we know full well that it brings the milk to our doorstep, the
coal to our bins, the provender to our larders. It helps weave the fabric
upon our backs, build the shoes upon our feet, form the hats upon our
heads. At every corner, every turn, we are dependent upon the railroad.
Therefore there is not a man or a woman in the entire United States to
whom its present plight should not be of the keenest interest and
importance.
* * * * *
We were promised a complete solution of our transport troubles with the
hurried passage two years ago of the Esch-Cummins Bill, now known
officially as the Transportation Act. Have we reached that solution, or
anything like unto a solution?
You do not have to ask the average man twice for an answer to that
question. He knows. If he is a business man he knows doubly well. He knows
that for the last ten years our American railroad system has been in
something of a decline. A decade ago it was at the zenith of its
efficiency. For eighty years it had been climbing upward; for the last ten
it has been slipping backward. Oh, yes, I do know its war record. It _was_
a fine record and one of which every American should be duly proud. There
is hardly a physician, however, who has not seen a patient, terribly sick,
under the stress of great emergency rise magnificently to a definite
situation of supreme importance. So four years ago rose our sick man of
American business. And now he has gone to bed more ill than ever before
while many doctors quarrel about his case.
And still he functions. The sick-abed man of our American business still
renders the all-necessary service that none but him really can render.
Fortunately perhaps American business itself at this moment is not in the
very best of health. One shudders to think what would happen if industry
all the way across the land were again in its top notches of production.
It is not the least of the perplexing phases of this all-perplexing
railroad problem of ours--the question, when traffic shall again rise (as
it certainly will) to normal volume, to say nothing of any abnormal
volume, of how our weakened railroad structure will meet it.
That it recently withstood severe tests is of course no indication that it
could again withstand such strains. All the way across the land our
railroad functioned in the recent ordeals through which it has
passed--which of course is not saying that it could do this again. It
quite naturally worked at its best in the western sections of the land,
where there are both less congestion and comparatively larger rail
transport facilities. Yet as one came east he found the American railroad
still meeting its responsibilities bravely and with a real degree of
efficiency. One crossed the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Maumee, and
still found the railroad functioning--the stout, pliable rod of its energy
bending but never breaking. He came further east still, crossed the
Susquehanna and then the Delaware, and still the rail carrier functioned.
He came to the Hudson and found the battered and overburdened railroad
machine still meeting its obligations, after a fashion at least.
Our railroad machine did not break even in New England, where conditions
are and for a long time past have been almost at their worst; where for
nearly two decades a high-grade community has been forced to pay penalty,
and pay generously, for a grave accumulation of railroad errors. It was in
New England that American railroading really began, with the construction
in 1808 of a crude wooden railed line at Quincy, Massachusetts, whose
horse-drawn cars brought granite from the quarries down to the water's
edge, whence it might go by sloop to Charlestown, where the tall shaft of
the Bunker Hill monument was beginning to arise. It was in New England too
that the first real railroad enterprise and development were shown; by the
middle of the forties a group of energetic and profitable small companies
rapidly expanded and offered genuine transport to six of the busiest and
most rapidly growing States of the Union.
It is in that same New England that when one comes to-day he finds the
picture of our national railroad machine almost at its very darkest--the
stations dirty, unpainted, neglected; the passenger-cars and the
locomotives in similar or even worse condition; the morale of the rank and
file of railroad labor low in many different ways. Remember that it is not
like this everywhere else within the land. It is particularly different
out in the West. Take California; out there the stations almost invariably
are clean and brightly painted, the broad lawns that surround them are in
the pink of perfection, while the trains that enter and leave the stations
are in full keeping with them. Engines, and the passenger-cars behind, are
alike clean, fresh-painted, efficient in every detail of their appearance.
Paint certainly does wonders. The cherry-red electric trains of the
Southern Pacific never seemed brighter or more immaculate. I rode a little
more than a year ago on a huge steam locomotive of the El Paso and
Southwestern railroad. The brightness of her appearance, the efficiency of
her performance, seemed to belie the fact that it was eleven years since
she had left the big shop in Philadelphia where she had been born.
Always it is as one comes further east that the American railroad machine
grows more and more shabby, until in New England we see it at its worst.
Our entire railroad structure, speaking nationally and subject only to a
few exceptions, is worn down a bit. It is a shoe outgrown. It pinches. It
pinches hard. Yet nowhere does it pinch harder than in New England. I
hinted but a moment ago of the transportation machine there, twisted and
bended and torn and all but completely broken. I spoke of the desolate
appearance of many of the trains and of the stations. The Boston and
Albany, it is true, has been something of an exception to this rule. The
present condition of the Springfield station does not prove the exception
however. Always a wealthy road, the B. & A. is compelled by its State
charter to return to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all of its earnings
in excess of an annual 8 per cent. It is hardly necessary to add that
even in its most prosperous years the excess earnings went into the
property. And in consequence the patrons of the road benefited. But that
was yesterday.
It was yesterday too that Boston possessed a suburban service in which she
could at least display some slight evidences of satisfaction. That
yesterday is now quite gone. To-day the service is unquestionably the very
worst in all this land. It is doubtful if any other large American city
would tolerate for a month the sort of suburban service which to-day is
doled out to the Boston metropolitan district. Ancient and dilapidated
cars, pulled by equally ancient and dilapidated locomotives, are the sad
lot of the Boston commuter. The records of the railroad companies
themselves show that some of these ancient coaches date from as far back
as the early eighties; many of them go back into the nineties. Nightly the
trains are crowded, not only to the extent of their seating capacities,
but well beyond them. Nightly the abominable overcrowdings of the New York
subways are repeated throughout the Boston suburban zone, and with far
less excuse.
In its appropriate time I shall discuss the large possibilities of
electrification as it applies in particular to the Boston suburban zone.
For the moment consider this New England corner as the darkest corner of a
transportation picture which to-day has but few patches of brilliancy. As
one goes from east to west however the picture brightens perceptibly. Do
not forget that it is at its very worst in New England and perhaps at its
best in California.
* * * * *
For the moment the freight service, nationally speaking at least, is not
subject to the same criticisms as the passenger. (To the depleted
passenger service we shall come in good time.) This for the simple reason
that the traffic is not being produced across the land. A sadly depleted
transportation structure easily can take good care of a sadly lessened
freight traffic. But let our wheels of industry begin really to hum again
and contemplating the present condition of our carriers, I shall fear a
reversion to the conditions of the winter months of the early part of
1920, when one box-car took forty days to go from Boston to Chicago, a
trip that easily should have been made in a fortnight, while another car
but a few days later took fifty days for the same journey!
Yet, to be entirely fair, these runs were made in a winter which, by the
official records of the weather bureau, was the worst that the country had
known in thirty-six years.
All right. Let us be fair. We shall go back three years to 1917 before
government control and the really big labor problems had been wished upon
the railroads. The New England roads even then were already having a
fearful time of it. The Boston Chamber of Commerce sent out questionnaires
to the big shippers of the district asking for specific reports on _all_
of the car-load shipments that they were making. When the questionnaires
came back to it, all filled in neatly on the dotted lines and in the blank
spaces, they showed the definite record of 2625 cars, quite enough to be
fully representative of the entire situation. One New England land shipper
reported that the fifty-nine cars which he had had in Chicago movement had
ranged from thirteen to eighty-seven days in transit. (Remember, if you
will, that a fair average for that journey is fourteen days.) One hundred
and sixty cars bound to his siding from various Western points had
together consumed 6709 days in transit. A reasonable time for their
journeys would have totaled 2550 days. Detentions due solely to railroad
delays had in his one case come to the considerable figure of 4159 days.
For the entire 2625 cars--in almost every case from the primary
grain-markets of the West--the total transit time came to 109,569
car-days. Again the law of fair average time comes into play. Let me
explain briefly how it is made. To the shortest time in transit between
two given points an arbitrary of 50 per cent. is added. This makes the
fair average. In practice it results that the average time to Boston from
points east of a line drawn through Buffalo and Pittsburg is fixed at
seven days. Two weeks are allowed from points west of that line and east
of the Mississippi, three weeks from those east of the Missouri and thirty
days from places as far distant as Montana. With this rule as a measure
and taking the individual routings of each of these 2625 box-cars, the
fair average time of all of them came to a total of 40,753 car-days.
Subtracting this time from the total transit time as you have just had it,
we get in a few months at the beginning of 1917 a railroad detention of
68,996 car-days, or an average waste of 26.2 days for each car. If this
waste could have been avoided there would have been an additional use of
9856 cars for one week each, or 3285 cars for a three weeks' period. The
hard-headed railroad executives who continue to argue against a too
elaborate car-building program must understand these figures and their
full import. Nor can their brethren in the field be entirely blind to the
success of the Car Service Commission of the American Railway Association
in making an extensive and vastly bettered use of the freight equipment
immediately at hand at that time and available all the way across the
country. It takes a lot of time and money to build any considerable
quantity of new freight-cars. It does not take much of either to make a
better use of the cars already in operation. And this is the very thing
that had been done to a certain extent, up to the beginning of the present
business slump.
It would not be just or fair to assert or even to imply that all of the
car delays which we have just seen occurred within the boundaries of New
England. It is just as fair to assume that many of them came to pass in
Montreal, or in Toronto, or West Albany, or East Buffalo, or Altoona, or
Brunswick, as in West Springfield, or Cedar Hill, or Mechanicville. But
when this point has been stated the fact still remains that the New
England roads to-day are and have been for a number of years past fairly
typical--certainly not exceptional--of the condition that prevails in
certain other sections of the land, particularly upon the so-called
"weaker lines." The great trouble is that in New England there are
virtually no strong roads. They are all down in the doldrums. Even the
last series of rate advances by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which
gradually are proving very profitable to many of the already strong
railroads in the southwestern corner of the United States, have failed to
bring relief to the already weakened properties in its northeastern
corner.
In the course of this book I shall refer more than once to the deplorable
New England situation. I have referred just now to the fearful delays to
freight originating there in the last fairly normal period of private
operation, giving full heed to the fact that many if not most of these
delays occurred outside of the actual New England territory, in order to
emphasize the absolute unpreparedness to-day of our national railroad
structure should great freight traffic demands be made upon it once again.
In a merely introductory chapter I cannot expatiate at length upon the
reasons that have led to this bad condition nor attempt to give the
methods by which it may possibly be corrected. I merely am trying to paint
in brief a picture that has all too few high lights. In the course of this
book I shall attempt gradually to fill in some of the details.
All these things, and many others too, are upon the face of our present
railroad situation in this country. When one goes beneath the surface
matters are even worse. If one is a security-holder in rails he does not
have to study Wall Street reports to see the saddening decline in dividend
payments--either average or cumulative. It is he who long ago began to
smell the rat. And the news that in the railroad the employer and the
employee have been slipping further and further apart until a seemingly
unbridgeable gulf has come to exist between them, that the executive
personnel of our railroads of to-day is growing on in years with little
or none to replace it, that no steps whatsoever are being taken to bring
our railroad structure up to the necessities of to-day--to say nothing of
to-morrow--is not news to him.
Perhaps the most pathetic of all these declines is that of the fine
tradition of American railroading--the thing which in war days we learned
to call morale. It was that tradition that used to make the farmer's boy,
as he stood in the field and watched the express sweep by, yearn to become
a railroad president. In a less romantic and far more concrete form it
enabled the old-time railroaders to fight against fearful conditions at
times--against the blizzards of midwinter in the north, the blazing
midsummer of southern deserts, flood, pestilence--come what might, that
old-time railroader was ready for it.
It was the survival of that tradition, the fine fiber of its long-created
morale, that enabled our railroads to make such a fine war-time
performance. And it is its lessening, the gradual passing of the old-time
railroader with none of his caliber to replace him, that is one of the
tragedies of our railroad situation of to-day.
To Americans these things still will come as more or less of a surprise.
They may have felt themselves fairly remote from actual railroad
responsibility. They may have been depositors in the saving-banks downtown
or holders of policies in the insurance companies, and yet have quite
forgotten the millions of dollars of railroad securities in the
strong-boxes of these great fiscal institutions. The financial
ramifications of the railroad as well as its social and commercial ones
are far-reaching indeed.
Once again, it is because of this intertwining of the railroad with the
every-day life of the American community in its every phase and relation
that the growing seriousness of its present predicament becomes a matter
of so large national import. Our transport problem is no academic matter.
It is very real, very human, very close to every one of us. I did not
overstate when I said that the railroad to-day was life itself to us. And
because it is life, our life if you please, its present serious problem is
very much our business.
If we should go back and begin at the beginning we should find our
American railroads in their beginnings small individual units, in many
cases personal properties, like a store or a bank or a factory, and seldom
correlated. Even the gages of our pioneer roads did not always agree, and
in at least one case purposely so. The early builders of the Erie felt
that by laying down a six-foot gage for their enterprise they would
succeed in keeping their freight-cars and other equipment on their own
property and under their own eyes. In this purpose they succeeded
admirably. They also succeeded in keeping the freight-cars of other
railroads, bringing valuable interchange merchandise, off their rails,
with the eventual result that that railroad, twenty years after it was
first laid down, was forced at great trouble and expense to bring its
track to the standard width.
There was much that was crude and experimental about those early roads--a
condition that was of course bound to exist. The traveler who went abroad
upon them quickly became aware of all this. In the beginning he would
change cars four or five times between Albany and Buffalo; and when
fifteen or sixteen years later the railroad had extended itself all the
way out to Chicago there were three or four more changes to be made.
To-day a solid train from New York or Boston to Chicago or St. Louis is so
much a part of our regular order of things as to cause no comment
whatever. Yet even to-day one cannot ride across the North American
continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific without a change of
cars--that is, not in the United States. In Canada he can do it quickly,
easily, comfortably. Of which much more in good time.
The lack of convenience in the handling of freight was equal to if not
greater than that in the handling of passengers. Of through routes there
were none. Freight bound from five hundred to a thousand miles or more was
repeatedly transferred and retransferred. The fact that until the late
seventies two such important links of the important New York-Chicago
routes as the former Lake Shore and the New York Central and Hudson River
railroads had gages varying a little more than an inch, and so
necessitating an elaborate mechanism at Buffalo for the transfer of the
trucks beneath the freight-car bodies, shows the fearful lack of rail
correlation everywhere across the land. Indeed it was hardly a decade
before, that a state of near civil war had been precipitated at Erie,
Pennsylvania, by the efforts of the Lake Shore railroad to standardize its
gage through that town. The townsfolk, urged and led forward by local
hotel-keepers and bus-drivers, had stoutly resisted the change.
In railroad rate-making and accounting of every sort conditions were even
more chaotic. There were no standards. You could hardly expect a group of
several hundred widely separated and highly individualistic railroads to
have uniform bookkeeping practices when in many instances there were not
enough standards in the building of their cars to enable them to be
coupled together into a single train.
And yet with all of this wretched system, or lack of any system
whatsoever, those little railroads of yesterday had many, many things in
their favor. Their very individuality was an asset. The fact that they
were owned and operated by men who lived upon their lines or very close to
them was a still greater asset. The railroad executive of those days
understood from first-hand knowledge and intimate personal contact the
problems as well as the opportunities of the communities that he was
trying to serve. And a third and still greater asset was the close
personal relationship that he might enjoy with his employees. On a
railroad owning from twelve to twenty locomotives he might know, and
almost invariably did know, not only each of those engines individually
but the men who ran them. In fact in those days it was customary for a
locomotive to be named and to be assigned to a permanent crew of engineer
and fireman, who immediately began to take a surpassing pride in the
upkeep of their craft--in keeping her boiler black and shiny and her
brasses and her nickel-work gleaming like new.
In these days the brass and the nickel and all the rest of the former gay
trimmings have departed from the locomotive. Its boiler is no longer
shiny. On the average American railroad, locomotive upkeep has become an
all but forgotten art. The names and the individuality have gone from its
engines. They are assigned to crews out of the roundhouses in a very
systematic and utterly unsentimental way. Yet something very definite has
been lost.
You could scarce expect a modern railroad president whose system may own
three or four thousand locomotives to know any considerable number of the
men who operate them. Yet here is the loss. On that little road of
yester-year the president not only knew his engine crews by
name--generally calling them by their first names--but his conductors, his
station-agents, his telegraphers too. And knowing them, understanding
them, working with them in almost every case, there was no labor-union
problem to confront him. There were no unions then for the simple reason
that there was no necessity for them. The labor-union upon the railroad
with all of its problems for the management came definitely as an effect
of its super-consolidation. And the railroad tradition began to fall.
Even after the first steps in the inevitable consolidation of our various
lines had begun, when for instance the six railroads in the
three-hundred-mile stretch between Albany and Buffalo had been merged into
the first New York Central, this intimate sense of personal relationship
remained for a long time.
The statue of William Bliss, president of the Boston and Albany railroad,
which stood for many years in the lobby of the old Kneeland Street Station
in Boston, typified it. When the Boston and Albany was the Boston and
Albany it was the pride not only of its employees but of all New England.
But when, in accordance with the general railroad practice of the moment,
the Vanderbilts took it over upon a long lease and painted out the old
name, placing "New York Central" upon the cars and locomotives, New
England rose in its anger, and it was not appeased until a shrewd
executive, going to Boston from New York, reversed the new order of things
and painted the beloved old name back again upon the equipment. After
which serenity ruled once again along the lines of the "Albany," as the
Boston people to this day love to call it.
What's in a name? More than you can imagine. I asked a shrewd brotherhood
man once what the New York Central had sacrificed in operating efficiency
when it had chosen to paint the names "Lake Shore," "Michigan Central,"
and "Big Four" from its western constituent lines, and he said that he
guessed--it really is anybody's guess--that 50 per cent. would be about
right. The Pennsylvania system, with a great deal of real wisdom and long
vision, not many months ago decided to divide itself into four large
regional operating divisions, all to be known however under the general
title of Pennsylvania System. Yet an old passenger conductor with whom I
have ridden these great many years between New York and Philadelphia
confessed to me his great personal regret at the passing of the fine old
name, "Pennsylvania Railroad."
"I feel as if I had buried an old friend," said he. So felt others, and a
little later the Pennsylvania dropped the "system" from its official name
and came back as the good old Pennsylvania Railroad once again.
A few miles further south the people are still grieving over the loss of
the "Cumberland Valley," one of the earliest railroads of the
land--incidentally a Pennsylvania constituency and one which until the
recent change had held its name and its individuality. Across the land the
thing repeats itself again and again. Away up in the northwestern corner
you will find people to-day lamenting the renaming of their chief railroad
system into the Union Pacific.
"We were proud of the name 'Oregon-Washington Railway,'" said one of the
really big men of that community not long ago. "It was a good railroad and
we felt that in no small sense its goodness reflected that of this
particular corner of the U. S. A."
If this feeling comes to the patrons of these railroads how much more
distinctly must it come to their workers? In subsequent chapters in a
pleading for a division of our national railroad structure into shorter
operating units, despite the ponderous suggestions of the Transportation
Act, I am going to refer to the fact that in this country a half-dozen or
so of the small railroads ("small" at least in a comparative sense) are
the best operated and hence the most profitable lines in the land. And
incidentally, despite the great tangle of red tape that the government
system of railroad control has spun about them, they still enjoy
comparatively friendly relations with their labor.
With the fundamental idea of railroad consolidation one can have no
quarrel whatsoever. It was inevitable. It came logically and
sequentially--in some ways before many folk were really aware of it. When
a very few years after the close of the Civil War the merger of the Grand
Trunk railroad was accomplished--a single system of nearly four thousand
miles, stretching all the way from Portland, Maine, by way of Montreal and
Toronto to Detroit (a little later, on to Chicago)--America stood aghast.
And yet what were four thousand miles to be compared with a single system
of twelve thousand miles of main-line track--nearly one-twentieth of the
total mileage in the United States, upon which moves one-seventh of the
traffic of the nation? And yet here is but one of three or four big
twelve-thousand-mile systems that our land holds.
In our Yankee version of the English language we dearly love that word
"big." Yet is it not now a fair time to ask what that bigness has really
cost us? Granted that with a certain amount of real aid from the state it
has given us through rail and through car routes of an amazing
multiplicity--even though one cannot cross the United States from the
Atlantic to the Pacific in a through car, unless it be a freight-car--that
it has simplified vastly our tariffs, our ticketing and our way-bill
systems, it certainly is failing to-day in many, many instances to give us
the high degree of service which our railroads themselves have educated us
to expect. As I said at the beginning our transport service to-day is
appreciably poorer and the rates a great deal higher than they were a
decade ago, while the personnel problem of our railroads, in their
executive ranks as well as in the ranks of the great mass of their labor,
has become a matter of real alarm.
In this book I am going to give scant attention, if any, either to the
scandals or to the triumphs of railroad finance for a half-century past in
this country. Neither am I going to hark back to the evils of multiple and
ofttimes conflicting regulation of our carriers by the Federal and the
forty-eight State governments. Both have been pretty thoroughly treated
over and over again. And so we shall assume, first that the railroads must
be properly financed in order to function at all, and second that the
principle of regulation by the state is so thoroughly established by this
time as to be removed from the field of controversial argument; while the
perplexing factor of many and ofttimes annoying conflicts between the
State regulatory bodies, or between them and the Federal Interstate
Commerce Commission, is being solved automatically by the steadily
increasing usurpation of the individual rights of the various States by
the centralized government at Washington.
The problems upon which I shall prefer to linger in this book are those
that concern the physical side of our national railroad structure, future
as well as present, its operating problems as well as its purely human
ones, in these last including not merely the very human problem of the men
and women who work upon the railroad but those who ride upon it or
otherwise become its patrons. Granting the great importance of its
questions of finance and of state regulation, I still feel that these last
are of still greater portent to its future. With these properly solved,
finance and regulation, to a large extent at least, will solve themselves.
A national railroad structure well operated, with efficiency, with
economy, with vision, with a broad human relationship, will not have to
worry very much about the sale of its securities or about interference
from fussy regulatory bodies. I think that this may be fairly set down as
a fundamental fact in our argument.
As to what constitutes good operation, efficiency, economy, vision, broad
human relationship, there will of course come more than one opportunity
for an honest difference of opinion. It is in the sincere effort to gain
the real current of forward-looking opinion upon these great questions of
our national transportation problem that the writer for the last sixteen
years has traveled many thousands of miles across the United States and
Canada and has interviewed hundreds of people in railroad circles and out.
For more than a dozen years past he has foreseen the present crisis. The
coming of the World War hastened it a bit perhaps but the crisis was
inevitable. A drifting policy, which ofttimes was no policy at all,
followed by both the railroad and the various groups of persons that
assumed to control it, has brought us almost to the edge of supreme
catastrophe.
* * * * *
Go back with me once again to the beginning. Remember if you will that the
railroad in the United States to-day is a little more than ninety years
old. For eighty of those years it was in a state of steady and healthy
development and progress. For the last ten or twelve of them it has not
only been in a state of arrested development but narrowly approaching
entrance into a state of decadence.
For eighty years the American railroad grew, and grew heartily. It
financed its own growth and, consisting very largely of independent units,
financed itself quite readily and as a rule locally. It kept its physical
facilities, track and rolling-stock and all the rest of it, abreast if not
ahead of actual traffic requirements. About the beginning of the present
century, as presently we shall see, it began to feel the burden of greatly
increased material costs, and of taxation also. It met these added costs,
without any very visible addition to its revenues, by holding rather
tightly down on its pay-roll and by adopting large operating efficiencies
and economies. For a while these sufficed. They had to suffice. Appeals to
the State and Federal regulatory commissions for increased rates were
generally vetoed pretty promptly. Since the establishment of the
Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 these regulatory boards had
increased steadily in strength and in prestige. They felt their oats. And
many did not hesitate to deny the applications of the roads for rate
increases.
In 1906 something happened which in later years was to loom large in
American railroad history. Congress, under a considerable pressure from
President Theodore Roosevelt, passed the so-called Hepburn Bill, radically
amending the Interstate Commerce Act and giving the I. C. C. an almost
unbridled authority over railroad rates. The Interstate Commerce
Commission could not itself authorize changes in the tariffs of the
carriers but it could, and frequently did, veto any changes that the roads
themselves saw fit to make.
Parenthetically it may be stated that even though this increase of power
granted to the big Federal commission stirred up something of a
competitive energy on the part of the State regulatory commissions to
supervise more carefully than ever before the operation of the railroads
through their respective bailiwicks, it also marked the long beginning of
the end for the State boards; as far at least as our steam railroads are
concerned. As I have said already, it is still another of our difficult
national question-marks in which the old, old problem of States' rights
again shows its disagreeable face. Eventually it probably will be ended by
shearing these State boards of virtually if not absolutely all of their
supervision over interstate railroads; and the I. C. C. long since has
shown marvelous ways in which this phrase may be extended to cover even
the tiniest of apparent intra-state lines.
The passage of the Hepburn Bill put the first quietus upon the development
of the carriers. Soon after, they began to cease large additions to their
plants, even though the nation that they served went steadily ahead in its
development, by leaps and by bounds. Yet for full ten years after 1906 the
net earnings of the carriers continued to increase, in pace with the great
growth of the nation and its industries in those selfsame years, until
under the war stress of 1916 and 1917 they had come to the astounding
total of almost a billion dollars a year "net operating income," which
under the rigorous accounting systems of the Interstate Commerce
Commission signifies the amounts available for paying interest and
dividends and making permanent improvements. In other words the
deterioration of the national railroad structure had begun well before the
maximum of net earnings had been reached, and by the end of 1917 had
reached so serious a stage as to threaten a possible breakdown--I am
using this last word advisedly--or at best a fearsome congestion and
uselessness, in the face of one of the gravest national crises that the
United States has ever had to meet.
Confronted with such a possibility President Wilson did not hesitate. He
took no chances. With the supreme powers which were his as the war leader
of the nation he reached out and took over the railroads and made them a
direct agency of the national conduct of the war, under the name of the
United States Railroad Administration, placing them under the direct and
autocratic control of William G. McAdoo, secretary of the treasury and a
man with not only a large knowledge of railroad finance but with a degree
of success as an actual railroad operator--of the short but busy Hudson
and Manhattan rapid transit lines connecting New York, Jersey City,
Hoboken, and Newark.
There has perhaps been no single activity of the Wilson administration and
its conduct of the war more seriously discussed and criticized than its
control of the railroads. Even the gigantic expenditures and manifest
blunders of the Shipping Board have been passed quickly by, to linger upon
those of Mr. McAdoo and his fellows in the Railroad Administration. Yet
when all has been fairly considered the Railroad Administration in its
brief twenty-six months of life accomplished some very creditable things,
and some not so creditable--some of these obvious, some others most
unexpected and strangely outre. It was obvious for instance that a highly
centralized, automatic, and supreme control could obtain large operating
economies by completely obliterating competition and could by appealing to
the traveler and the shipper in the role of a sadly harassed government,
obtain a cooperation that no private agency might ever obtain.
Because the brief history of the Railroad Administration enters so very
vitally into any consideration of the railroad situation in the United
States both to-day and to-morrow, I shall come to it for the next chapter
of this book. For the final paragraphs of this, consider once again the
present lowered efficiency of our rail transport in this country. That it
has been bettered in some of its phases since its relinquishment by the
government I shall not deny; that it has been bettered in some of the most
vital of them I shall dispute until the end. The proofs are too easily at
hand. And so the reading of them may lead us into a really intelligent
understanding of the situation.
* * * * *
What's the matter with our railroads?
That question is being asked hundreds of times each day by business men
all the way across the land--from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon,
from north to south and back again. These men, keen in their perception of
many of the great and perplexing problems assailing the United States at
this moment, frankly admit their lack of an understanding of the railroad
one. They are torn by a vast conflict of statements and of opinions.
Skilled propagandists succeed only in adding to the confusion. Apparently
nowhere is an independent voice raised in the interest of the common
citizen of America, the man who perhaps is not a wholesale user of our
overland transport but who realizes from personal contact each time he
makes a shipment of his goods or goes himself abroad into the land that
our national railroad has suffered a vast deterioration within the last
decade, that it no longer functions with anything like the high efficiency
that it had attained say twelve or fifteen years ago.
What's the matter with our railroads?
It is a fair question, and one that demands a fair answer. Why should not
our railroad structure in the United States to-day be rendering service at
least as good as that which it rendered but ten or twelve years ago? Is it
man failure, either in the lists of the rank and file or in those of the
executives? Is it, as has been charged frequently, interference by the
Federal and State governments or, to put it in a gentler fashion,
over-regulation by these same agencies? Is there lack of intelligence or
vision or human understanding? If so, just where are these lacks?
It is to the answering of these questions that the writer puts his sixteen
years of intimate and personal study of the American railroad and, as he
has just promised, takes up that problem on April 5, 1917, the day that
the United States of America officially entered the World War overseas.
CHAPTER II
THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION
Long before the clear Washington morning had broken which succeeded that
stormy April evening of 1917 when the United States first entered the
World War, the railroad executives themselves had been feeling that there
would need to be correlated and cooperative effort to make the rail
transport system of the country adequate to meet the new and added burden
to be laid upon its already sadly bended back. Not many weeks after that
terrible August, 1914, the United States was feeling the reflection of the
world disturbance, although feeling it in some unexpected ways. In August,
1914, few people in this country if any dreamed of the tidal wave of
industrial production that was soon to all but overwhelm us, when
Bridgeport turned (almost overnight, it seemed) from a sleepy Connecticut
manufacturing town into an overcrowded metropolis wherein people by the
hundreds slept nightly in the railroad station, and the new county
almshouse was transformed into an overflow hotel; when Akron, Ohio, ran
wild with prosperity, growth, and overcrowding; when drowsy old Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, became a bedlam of industry and Chester, Pennsylvania, the
same; when Detroit, well used to rapid growth, now leaped ahead toward the
million mark; and when so also in a large degree did Wilmington, Delaware,
and Youngstown, Ohio, and Trenton, New Jersey, and Rochester and
Schenectady, New York--dozens of other communities like them.
Manufacturing plants worked night and day and doubled and trebled and
quadrupled themselves in a matter of mere months; half-abandoned
shipyards sprang into life and extension; mines were dug with a furious
speed into the rich subsurfaces of mother earth--production everywhere.
And everywhere the chief burden of all this was coming upon the back of
the American railroad, and coming at a time when it could ill afford any
overload.
As even a casual student of the situation easily understands, for the six
or eight years before the advent of 1914 most if not all of the railroads
of the United States had been in a period of serious retrenchment. Soon
afterwards the beginning of the present and national increases in the cost
of living had become an appreciable burden to them, not so much (as we
shall see before we are done with this book) in their wages as in their
cost of coal and other materials. They had endeavored to meet this
increase in one expense in the conduct of their business by cutting down
in other expenses. "Economy" and "efficiency" had become real catchwords
to them. In both of these they accomplished much. At least so it seemed in
1914. Their economies up to that time, compared with the ones that have
been achieved since then, were almost as nothing.
So the railroads were none too well equipped to meet the strain of greatly
increased business that the war overseas thrust upon them. Their supply of
locomotives and cars was inadequate. The track equipment upon which they
ran their terminals and yards and their shop facilities were, if in good
repair, at any rate in most cases no longer generous. And that prized
possession of the American railroad of yesterday, the morale of its men,
the thing that I shall call "the fine tradition of our American
railroading" again and again and again before I am done with this book,
was already on the wane.
So to an economic agent already sadly overburdened if not actually
crippled was to be given also the serious and the urgent business of
transporting soldiers and sailors and their munitions, a United States
army of a size never before conceived, supplies in a vastness heretofore
deemed incredible. Long before Woodrow Wilson's signature was dry upon the
dreaded declaration of war the War Department experts were making detailed
plans for the enlistment, the training, the supply, and the transport of
the new army that was to go overseas. They involved many things, most
important among them the creation of thirty or forty great concentration
and training camps and huge ports of embarkation.
To meet these needs the already swollen manufacturing industry of the land
was spurred into fresh efforts of production. More factory buildings went
up, more shipyards were established--we were talking about the "bridge of
ships across the Atlantic" those days--more abandoned mines were put into
activity once again.
All these things were a fearful burden upon a national railroad structure
that was from the beginning inadequately equipped for a proper handling of
them. Yet how did the national railroad structure meet this added burden
set upon its badly bended shoulders? The answer is--like a good American
citizen. Up to that April night, without a really efficient or concrete
central body, it already had sought to create one. It took the ancient and
somewhat archaic American Railway Association, shook new life into it, and
on April 11, 1917--six days after the war declaration--established at
Washington what was known as the Railroad War Board. For the personnel of
this board the national railroad structure sought out some of the very
best of its executives: Fairfax Harrison of the Southern railway, Hale
Holden of the Burlington, Julius Kruttschnitt of the Southern Pacific,
Howard Elliott of the Northern Pacific, Samuel Rea of the Pennsylvania,
and Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio. The first five of these men
were made into the active war board and immediately moved themselves to
Washington where they set up a permanent headquarters. Mr. Willard already
was prominently identified with the business of the organization of this
country's part in the World War as chairman of the Council of National
Defense, which was then doing a very great work of hurried preparation for
the conflict, but which President Wilson afterward saw fit to relieve of
most of its power and responsibility.
At the request of the American Railway Association Mr. Willard became an
ex officio member of the Railroad War Board and was in constant
consultation with it. So did Edgar E. Clark, a valued member of the
all-powerful Interstate Commerce Commission at that time and a veteran
railroader of wide experience, having risen to the rank of conductor and
in time become the head of the great brotherhood of that branch of
railroading.
The Railroad War Board came into being committed to the idea of a single
continental railroad in the United States as a war-time measure; please
mark this fact for future reference. Indeed that efficient and economical
idea had been in the heads of some of our practical railroaders for a good
many years before the coming of the World War. But any steps that they
might take toward it then seemed to bring them afoul of the Federal
statutes--particularly the so-called Sherman Law--and in imminent danger
of the penitentiary. Now, however, there seemed to be the faint ghost of
an opportunity to gain some of the obvious practical advantages that
naturally would inure from a centralized control of our national railroad
structure.
Three great things, however, the War Board lacked. The first was the
financial backing of the Government. No matter what broad plans for
efficiency it might and did adopt--and that they were effective plans the
statistics of their results most clearly show--the railroads lacked the
financial resources to go into a market where rising labor and raw
material costs were being reflected directly in tremendously increased
prices for locomotives and cars and rails and every other what-not that
goes to the making and maintaining of a railroad. On the contrary they
watched the value of their securities drop as they listened to the demands
of their employees for higher wages.
Beyond the War Board's local authority, it had no real centralized
control, no genuine supreme power. After all, it was but a group of
men--big men, powerful individualists, each of them. They had been reared
in powerful roads, roads of great traditions. They had been competitors,
powerful competitors. Cooeperation, at the best, was no easy pathway for
them.
Remember always that the Railroad War Board lacked authority. It could not
even compel its own member roads to fall in line and stay in line toward
the formation of the single national railroad system. And as for the
shipper, it could only go to him on bended knee and beg his cooperation.
And of all the shippers the Government was perhaps the worst of all. It is
our own beloved Uncle Samuel who is a most obdurate and unreasonable old
fellow when he takes it into his head to become a patron of the railroad.
If he is a passenger and in gold lace and khaki he may come into the train
and demand that it be stopped and started to suit his own convenience.
That frequently is done. And as a shipper he was forever letting his
boys--Food and Fuel and Ships and a lot of others too--place priority
orders upon their shipments, to the immense complication of the entire
railroad situation.
The Railroad War Board began slipping in November, 1917. The hard early
winter of that year finished the job. The inspectors of the Interstate
Commerce Commission at various terminals and division points (themselves
none too friendly to the War Board) began filing by telegraph their
reports of delayed cars and trains, and the members of that commission, at
the suggestion of the President, began framing a bill supplementing the
measure of August, 1916, which had permitted him to take over the lines in
case of a national emergency, and outlining the plans for the step as well
as for the protection of the security-holders of the properties. The plan
was in Mr. Wilson's hands early in December and he decided that
McAdoo--who seemed to stand in an impartial and aloof position from all
the properties and who had not only a rapid transit electric railroad
experience at least, but remarkable acumen in financial matters--ought to
have the job. McAdoo sought to decline it. I honestly believe that he
never wanted it. The President insisted. The weather grew more inclement,
the railroad rod bent further than ever before. Then on the eve of
Christmas something happened. A great American railroad stood in the
shadow of bankruptcy. Other receiverships were to follow upon its heels.
Such a calamity was unthinkable. The die was cast. The White House moved,
and moved quickly. McAdoo accepted his new responsibility and on December
28, 1917, became director-general of more miles of railroad than any one
man--even the late E. H. Harriman--had ever even dreamed of controlling.
William Gibbs McAdoo took hold of his new job with a pretty firm grasp. He
said that he was going to "do things" and apparently he meant to keep his
word. With one stroke of the pen he abolished the abominable priority
orders and with another he doubled the demurrage charges upon
freight-cars--two vastly important executive steps toward a bettering of
the entire railroad situation. The rapidly retiring Railroad War Board,
confronted by the increasing conditions of congestion upon the roads, at
the eleventh hour sent an urgent request to the various lines that they at
once reduce their passenger services at least (it had been suggested that
their entire public service be suspended for several days)--suggestion
which in some cases was acted upon with more enthusiasm than judgment.
There was many a division superintendent who saw a chance to take a
death-crack at that unprofitable, unhealthy, money-eating 11:08--or was it
the 5:15? In other days a stern State commission probably had stood to
forbid him, in the public interest, removing a train which might have had
an average of seventeen passengers a day. Now the authority of the State
commissions, even to a large extent of the all-powerful Interstate
Commerce Commission, had largely been superseded.
The Pennsylvania, which for many years past has had the major share of
traffic between New York and Washington, had asked a little time before to
have its fastest express between the two cities, the almost
internationally famous Congressional Limited, made an excess-fare train,
like the Merchants' Limited from New York to Boston or the Twentieth
Century from New York to Chicago. The commission, on the very eve of
McAdoo's accession, refused. The road withdrew the world-famous train
despite the fact that it was running to capacity and announced that
thereafter all trains between New York and Washington would carry but one
parlor-car each.
Now it happens that this route was and still is of tremendous commercial
importance, not alone for the movement of freight but for the movement of
men, big and little, in government service as well as in essential private
business, back and forth between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and
New York, and the great territory that lies behind all of these cities.
McAdoo's quick judgment saw the need of clean, comfortable, quick transit
for these men and ordered the famous train back again, even though it did
not then regain its historic name nor quite all of its parlor-cars, nor
run at quite as brisk a pace as heretofore.
McAdoo is no fool. Even his bitterest enemies--and he has plenty of
them--will admit that. His moves from the very beginning of his
overlordship of the railroads were generally marked with extreme
shrewdness. And although he does not cooperate well he showed himself
possessed of a genius for organization as well as for coordination. Yet
almost as soon as he stepped into the office on the ninth floor of the new
Interstate Commerce Commission building that had been hurriedly set aside
for the use of the director-general of the railroads, he impressed into
service the various working subcommittees of the Railroad War Board, but
courteously and promptly dismissed that Board itself.
With the Railroad War Board out of the way the director-general moved
quickly toward finding a substitute for it. At the beginning he said that
he was going to try to surround himself with the ablest and most
experienced railroaders in the land--an advisory board, which would be in
effect a railroad cabinet, divided so as to include a man from each of the
great interests already concerned in national rail transport, one
representing operation, another maintenance and equipment, another
finance, another traffic, another public service and accounts, another
law, still another labor.
Yes, labor. Labor at last was to sit in the high council of railroad
transportation. That had a new sound in the game. Yet McAdoo was quick to
include it in his plans. And at that time he added:
"I am putting in men of no partisan views--partisan neither to capital nor
to labor. In every case I have tried to select men who will inspire
confidence. I want men of broad vision."
The man who dug the great tunnels under the Hudson River when every one
else had pronounced the project as chimerical could hardly stand accused
himself of any lack of vision. Moreover McAdoo's selections in nearly
every case justified his words. He began by choosing as his right-hand
assistant and general adviser Walker D. Hines, an extremely able New York
lawyer, who in the forty-seventh year of his life was chairman of the
board of the Santa Fe. On the average road the chairmanship of the board
of directors is likely to be a sort of sanitarium for retired executives.
Not so with the Santa Fe. Its late president, E. P. Ripley, the man who
was instrumental in bringing it out of bankruptcy and up to its place as
one of the greatest single systems in the United States, ten or twelve
years ago was seeking a young man who could represent the road in New
York, and represent it with the proper authority. He found such a man in
Hines, then barely turned forty, and he never regretted his choice.
Moreover Hines, in a brilliant legal connection with the Louisville and
Nashville before going to the Santa Fe, had begun to acquire his
remarkable knowledge of railroad conditions in virtually every section of
the land.
The Santa Fe has always had much good motive-power, human and mechanical.
McAdoo chose two of this first class, Hines and Edward Chambers, its
former vice-president in charge of traffic. These men formed the beginning
of his advisory cabinet. To them he added gradually several others--Henry
Walters of Baltimore, chairman of the board of the extremely sound and
conservative Atlantic Coast Line; John Skelton Williams, controller of the
currency, who had been not only the president but really the creator of
the Seaboard Air Line; Carl R. Gray, at that time president of the Western
Maryland railroad and now occupying a similar post upon the Union Pacific;
and Judge John Barton Payne, who also had served as chairman of the
Shipping Board and as secretary of the interior.
Offhand these looked like good appointments; in reality too they _were_
good appointments--able men in every instance; men of the broadest
experience. But the men on the inside--those who have a thorough
understanding of the wheels within wheels in the working of the big
national railroad machine--saw more in these appointments than a mere
search for transport ability.
"Walters and Williams," they said, "Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air
Line. It's a hard dig at Fairfax Harrison."
They were referring of course to the brilliant young president of the
Southern railway, who was the chairman of the Railroad War Board,
constituted, you will remember, as a war measure by the railroads
themselves. In that job, and against no small odds, Harrison had won a
fair measure of success. He felt keenly the slap at him in the McAdoo
selections; he felt another when he was virtually deposed from the control
of the railroad which had been his great pride and ambition, and young Mr.
Markham brought down from Chicago to be the McAdoo generalissimo of all
the roads in the southeastern corner of the land at Atlanta. Yet that last
thrust was hardly greater than the first, when the ranking heads of the
two railroads which had been the hottest enemies of the Southern in that
which it regarded peculiarly as its own territory were lifted to eminence,
while the president of the Southern was permitted to retire to Richmond as
merely its corporate head, without one atom of authority over the
operation of his road.
Those who know Fairfax Harrison know how these two blows must have cut. He
is a man of intense pride as well as patriotism, a railroader who almost
plays the lone hand but plays it very well indeed. A gentleman to the
core, born of the gentlest of Virginia blood and lineage--his father
private secretary to Jefferson Davis, his mother a gifted American
novelist, his brother one-time governor-general of the Philippines--his
pride in his family has for years past been exceeded by his pride in the
railroad which, as a logical successor to the late Samuel Spencer, he had
been upbuilding. Fairfax Harrison himself is a _literateur_ of no small
merit. He has made translations of the classics, while to him has long
been ascribed the composition of an essay in Latin on the proper carving
of Virginia ham. Yet I dare say that in none of his literary excursions
has he ever reached greater charm than in the booklet which he wrote eight
or nine years ago on the tragic sacrifices made by the men of the Southern
who strove to keep their road open and in operation during the terrific
floods of 1913.
Yet Harrison was not the only man to be reduced menially as well as
physically by the director-general of railroads. Carl R. Gray, himself one
of the most lovable men in the business, was then president of the Western
Maryland. He came to it from a high office with the 'Frisco. That
railroad, originally a small local affair largely financed by the city of
Baltimore and for many years terminating at Hagerstown in the Cumberland
valley, had been built, largely by Rockefeller capital, through to
Cumberland and Connellsville (by connection to Pittsburg), paralleling the
main stem of the Baltimore and Ohio for virtually the entire distance. It
was a real thorn in the side of the B. & O. Mr Gray was quickly elevated
to a high post in the Railroad Administration. This was a distinct thrust
at Daniel Willard.
It will be recalled that the distinguished figure of Daniel Willard,
president of the Baltimore and Ohio, loomed large in the Railroad War
Board. Mr. Willard was doomed to feel the displeasure of official
Washington. Just why, I never have been able to understand. He went to the
service at the very outbreak of the war and gave himself unreservedly to
Mr. Wilson and his associates. And at the very hour of the Armistice he
was in army khaki, prepared to sail overseas to undertake the operation of
the entire system of French railways, which were beginning to go down
under their terrific burden of more than four years.
Yet Mr. Willard's reward for all of this was removal from the actual
operation of his road. Samuel Rea, the president of the Pennsylvania,
suffered a similar fate. Yet this was not all. An official order was sent
out from Washington to the effect that these presidents were to be
deprived of the use of their official cars--the phrase "private-car" long
since has come into disrepute; it smacks too much of junketing. A fairly
circumlocutious method was offered by which these gentlemen could
occasionally avail themselves of their cars. They declined to avail
themselves of so patronizing an offer. Mr. Rea's car finally was assigned
to an operating officer of the Railroad Administration; Mr. Willard's
gathered dust for two long years in a corner of the train-shed of Camden
Station, Baltimore.
Mr. McAdoo's answer to the quiet but strenuous protests that went to the
supreme authority at Washington against his treatment of Mr. Willard and
Mr. Rea was extremely disingenuous. He disclaimed personal feeling and
said that his act was the following out of an established policy.
Officially that policy was thus stated in his own words:
Inasmuch as "no man can serve two masters," and the efficient
operation of the railroads for winning the war and the service to the
public is the purpose of Federal control, it was manifestly wise to
release the presidents and other officers of the railroad companies,
with whose corporate interest they are properly concerned, from all
responsibility for the operation of their properties.... All ambiguity
of obligation is thus avoided. Officers of the corporation are left
free to protect the interests of their owners, stockholders, and
creditors, and the regional and operating managers have a direct and
undivided responsibility and allegiance to the United States Railroad
Administration.
He then went ahead in accordance with this announced policy and appointed
Federal managers for the larger roads, incorporating into their direction
smaller lines, closely affiliated or connected with them. But in almost
every case the president of the railroad became its Federal manager,
invariably at a lower salary than the private corporations had paid. Mr.
Harrison, Mr. Willard, Mr. Rea, Mr. Kruttschnitt, and Mr. Underwood (of
the Erie) were extremely conspicuous exceptions to this rule.
* * * * *
I am setting down these intensely personal episodes in the conduct of the
Railroad Administration under its first director-general solely for one
purpose--they have had a very large bearing on the present-day plight of
our railroads of the United States. The bitternesses that were then
engendered have not ceased. I do not feel that Mr. Harrison or Mr. Willard
or Mr. Rea, to-day restored to their old positions and influence, now
harbors a single grievance against Mr. McAdoo because of them. The damage
that he did has all been done, in the thrust against the morale of the
rank and file of our American railroad organization. McAdoo talking to the
men from the rear end of his own private-car at Pueblo and at El Paso and
telling them that at last they were come into their own rights did not
begin to do the damage that the whispered rumors, running here and there
and everywhere, of what the director-general was doing to the former big
bosses of great railways did to our old-time traditions of railroad
respect and discipline.
In giving labor a seat in his cabinet McAdoo did a big thing. In making
speeches such as those at Pueblo and at El Paso he did a far smaller
thing, to put the matter very lightly indeed. In the innuendo of his
attitude toward a group of important railroad presidents a very great
wrong was done unquestionably.
The functions of the director-general's cabinet were national. In addition
to its members the steersman of the craft chose regional directors, at
first (and with but a few changes thereafter) as follows: for the
extremely congested lines north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi,
A. H. Smith, president of the New York Central; for the lines of the
Southeast, as we have just seen, C. H. Markham, president of the Illinois
Central; and for those of the rest of the country, R. H. Aishton,
president of the Chicago and Northwestern. Later Mr. Aishton's huge
territory was subdivided and three sub-regions made of it. In a similar
fashion New England also was made a sub-region, and James H. Hustis, the
very popular president of the Boston and Maine, placed in charge of it,
after him came Percy R. Todd of the Bangor and Aroostook, an executive
equally experienced in New England railroading.
Mr. Smith was the very first of these men to be chosen. He received a
telephone request to come to Washington one day late in December, 1917.
Boarding a midnight train, he was in McAdoo's office the next day. The
director-general of the railroads notified him that he had been drafted to
work out the fearfully congested situation in the Northeast. Without a
word of comment Smith turned on his heel, walked to a desk in the corner
of the room, and, picking up a block of paper, began inditing detailed
telegraphic instructions to the presidents of the roads in his new
jurisdiction as to their part in the great drama of national control whose
opening scene was so close at hand. A little later he returned to New
York. And at noon on December 28, 1917, the exact time set by President
Wilson for the curtain to rise on government operation of the continental
railroad system, Mr. Smith stood in his window on an upper floor of the
Grand Central Terminal, and, looking down at the maze of tracks below him,
trains coming, trains going, began the dictation of a short statement as
to the history, the size, and the strength of the property he headed.
"I want it to go into the record," said Smith. "The opportunity might not
come again."
He turned immediately to the work in hand. There was plenty of it to be
done. The great city around about the terminal was on the edge of panic.
There was a fuel famine and no promise of relief. New York at last was
paying the penalty of her medieval, not to say archaic, system of
distribution. At last the war was very real and very close at hand. They
were saying that many of the schools would have to close, that there was a
possibility the theaters would have to shut down each Monday night. Poor
New York! She did not then know that the worst was yet to come!
All this occurred with 300,000 tons of coal upon the Jersey side of the
Hudson River opposite the city, while in the midst of a winter of almost
unprecedented bitterness an ancient lighterage system struggled with ice
hardly less thick than that which once sufficed for a footpath for Henry
Ward Beecher from New York to Brooklyn, and could bring less than 30,000
tons of coal a day across the river. Nor was this all--no, not even a
reference now to the freight upon the Jersey meadows. Know now that the
greater part of that accumulated 300,000 tons of coal was in cars and that
production at the mines actually was being slowed down by the delay in the
return of these cars.
"Open the Pennsylvania tubes to the coal trains!" shrieked the radicals of
Manhattan. "Give us fuel trains and food trains instead of Florida
Limiteds! Put them through at the rate of fifty, one hundred, one hundred
and fifty a day, if needful!"
Some of these lost their heads. Smith did not lose his. Neither did he
impose any more humiliation upon the head of his great competitor. He
does not do business that way. Instead he gave careful heed to the
terminal possibilities of the Pennsylvania, the traditional and very real
rival of the road he himself headed.
"We may possibly make a freight use of the tubes," he said quietly, "but
it will be a moderate use. I shall limit the length of the trains to
thirty-six or thirty-seven cars, which really is no train at all. For I do
not want to see one of those fifty-ton battle-ship coal gondolas jumping
the track in a tube which was not designed for it, and so completely
blocking the line. I am going to be in a position to hand the terminal
back to the Pennsylvania in quite as good condition as I found it."
Then he made further explanations. After all the Pennsylvania tubes,
thrusting themselves across the island of Manhattan, are even in an
emergency of little or no freight use to it. They are too deep to be of
freight service to the heart of metropolitan New York. To Brooklyn, with a
population almost equal to that of Manhattan, to Queens, and to the Bronx
they eventually were made of some slight service.
This was not the big part of Smith's job, however. He made a quick survey
of the entire situation in his big district; trains and cars cluttered
here and there and everywhere. For the final thirty days of private
operation the situation steadily had been growing worse. In the districts
roundabout Pittsburg and Philadelphia and New York it had become
intolerable. Take, if you will, the industries in those vast manufacturing
districts and consider them multiplied tenfold, their influx of fuel and
of raw material increased in like proportion, and so with their output.
Add these industries one to another and see them in units of tens of
dozens of trains, of hundreds and thousands of coal-cars and flat-cars and
box-cars. And on the other hand, see all of these poured upon railroads
that had been steadily growing weaker for eight or ten years--more rapidly
weakened, however, in the last four months than in the entire three years
that preceded them. Bear in mind their tremendous loss of man-power
through the draft, consider the gradual wearing down of engines and cars
and tracks and terminals toward the breaking point, and wonder not then
that we had congestion and much worse east of the Mississippi and north of
the Ohio.
Throughout that autumn of 1917 we watched the bending of the rod of the
railroad just as we had watched it bend and then recover again through the
two hard winter seasons that have preceded this one. It bent further this
winter than ever before--the traffic was so much greater, and the
facilities with which to meet it so much weaker. No wonder that freight
moved slowly, more slowly, most slowly, and in many cases finally ceased
to move at all; that upon the Jersey meadows outside of New York were
30,000 car-loads of merchandise that could not be moved up to that port
and to the ships waiting to carry it overseas. At one time 150 ships stood
waiting for coal alone in New York Harbor. And overseas was a great war in
its critical stages. No wonder, though, that coal began coming in
dribblings to hearthstones that were whining for tons of it, that finally
it ceased coming at all for whole days, while great and ordinarily
comfortable American cities shivered and watched their death rates mount
higher than they had mounted in many a year.
It was a man-sized job that confronted A. H. Smith. Like a real railroad
man he handled it. He went in at once upon it. He began to do things. He
issued immediate embargoes against shipment into the New York district of
anything save food, news-print paper, live stock, perishable freight, and
freight consigned to the Government. He did more. With a great map of
metropolitan New York and its railroad terminals spread before him he
began ordering freight concentrated west of Buffalo and Pittsburg and
south of Washington into the trunk-lines which variously best serve the
great group of cities that constitute the metropolitan district of New
York. The Baltimore and Ohio for instance has exclusive terminal
facilities upon Staten Island, which with its many shipyards and wharves
is an important freight consignment point. In ordinary times, when the
situation was dominated by competitive conditions, a car-load of freight
offered the New York Central at Toledo or Detroit would be carried on its
lines to New York and then floated to Staten Island by car-ferry. In this
non-competitive war situation, in this hour when the temporary continental
railroad system of the United States was being born, such a car would be
taken by the New York Central from Toledo or Detroit to the Baltimore and
Ohio at some point west of Pittsburg, and then over it to Staten Island by
the shortest possible route.
What Smith was doing in New York his fellow regional directors in Atlanta
and in Chicago also were doing. Order was being worked out of chaos. The
great railroads of the United States, even temporarily and very hastily
welded into a single national system, showed good results of efficiency
and economy, just as some of their far-sighted private operators had
predicted more than two decades ago. Released from the shackles of the
Sherman Anti-Trust Law--Congress had refused such a release to the
Railroad War Board but quickly granted it to McAdoo--and from the
conflicting regulatory commissions all the way across the land, they were
able to simplify and unify their facilities--even though many times at
public cost and inconvenience--in a way that enabled them not only to
handle the pressure of war traffic and in an admirable fashion but also to
show great economies upon their cost-sheets.
To come to actual cases: It was good railroading when the centralized
Washington administration began assembling various sections of various
lines so as to gain not only more direct routes between important traffic
centers but lines of lowest possible gradients as well. In the West
particularly, great progress was made in this direction. For instance in
the old days of competitive railroading the Southern Pacific quite
naturally operated its through route from Dallas or Fort Worth to Los
Angeles and San Francisco over its own tracks through San Antonio or El
Paso. Of course the old-time and somewhat unfortunate Texas and Pacific
had a far shorter route from Dallas and Fort Worth direct to El Paso, but
the competitive situation, the fact that it was the Texas and Pacific and
not the Southern Pacific, prevented it from getting much volume of traffic
for its short line. Under government unification the T. & P. line came
into its own, with the result that 500 miles were taken off the through
route between the important North Texas cities and southern
California--with great resultant time and operating economies.
Similarly, there arose a war-time assembled through line from the
oil-fields at Casper, Wyoming, to Montana and Puget Sound points, 880
miles shorter than the route which the competitive situation formerly
forced. Freight from southern California to Ogden was hauled 201 miles
less than by the pathway formerly used; while the Railroad Administration
route between Chicago and Sioux City was 110 miles shorter than the old,
and 289 miles were saved in the through traffic between Kansas City and
Galveston and Houston. Multiply these examples and it is easy to see how
in a period of sixty days in the summer of 1918 nine thousand freight-cars
were so rerouted as to effect a saving in mileage traveled by each car of
about 195 miles, or a total saving of about 1,754,805 car-miles.
To be ranked with this sort of operating economy was the work undertaken
by Regional Director R. H. Aishton at Chicago when early in the spring of
1918 he began consolidating train movements so that instead of the several
competing trunk-lines coming down from out of the Northwest, each
operating competing through freight-trains each day into the great
terminal and interchange yards at St. Paul, and there shifting and
resorting their cars incredibly for distribution between the six
trunk-lines leading for another five hundred miles down into Chicago,
through trains were operated solidly from the Puget Sound points through
to Lake Michigan. For through freight the great railroad yards upon the
line between St. Paul and Minneapolis represented no more of a stop than
was necessary for changing engines, cabooses, and crews. Moreover these
through trains were distributed in alternation between the Northern
Pacific and Great Northern lines from the Pacific coast down to the Twin
Cities, but because of its superior mileage and gradient conditions they
were handled on to Chicago almost exclusively by the Northwestern.
Nor was Chicago--with almost inevitable traffic congestion, despite the
fact that it now bears upon its western rim the largest interchange and
clearing-house yard for freight-cars in the entire world--a railroad point
big enough to break this simple scheme of through service. Take the export
corn specials out of the Missouri valley. One of these trains, let us say,
consisted of thirty-one cars from Omaha and five cars from Sioux City, all
moving under special government permits, and was routed intact from Omaha
to Philadelphia. It came east over the Northwestern to a point well
outside of the Chicago congested district. There it was turned to the
tracks of the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern, one of the outermost of the
belt-line railroads which encircle Chicago. The Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern
in turn delivered the train--intact and unchanged, you will remember--to
the Nickel Plate, which at Buffalo handed it to the Lackawanna, which in
turn carried it as far as Scranton, giving it there to the Central
Railroad of New Jersey and the connecting Philadelphia and Reading for
prompt handling through to tide-water and a waiting ship at Philadelphia.
There was no switching and but little delay en route, and the train
generally went through from the Missouri to the Delaware in considerably
less than a week. Such a prompt through movement, with its saving of time
and money, was quite unheard of in the days of competitive railroad
management.
All the reroutings and consolidations of this sort by no means had been
confined to the western portions of the land. In the East many others were
made, particularly in the congested sections of war-munitions manufacture,
where, in addition to great numbers of war brides and shipyards and camps
and cantonments, requiring not merely outbound shipping facilities but
large quantities of raw materials and fuel, there had been a vast movement
of coal for both domestic use and export. In the handling of this coal
ingenious savings were made, both in the routings and in the details of
train operation. Roads and portions of roads, formerly in bitter
competition, were joined together in a way only possible under absolutely
unified and autocratic control. And in some cases the routings were so
made as to divert the great streams of through freight traffic, in order
to avoid areas already badly congested. Thus Atlantic-bound freight coming
up into St. Louis from the Southwest was sent far to the north and even
through Canada before it reached the seaboard. A glance at the map and a
fair understanding of the present traffic situation will show the
necessity of this. The lines that reach into the coal-fields of eastern
Kentucky and West Virginia and western Pennsylvania were much burdened
these months. It hardly was fair to ask them to carry much through freight
upon their already heavily laden shoulders. And the Pittsburg district,
with its various narrow _impasses_ made by broad rivers and sharp-sided
mountains, is a railroad abomination--a fearfully congested traffic
gateway which, by reason of those selfsame rivers and mountains, is hardly
capable of radical enlargement, even at great cost.
The railroads that run along the south shore of Lake Erie, ample as are
their facilities, already had a full load of traffic from Chicago, the
West, and the Northwest. So the traffic from St. Louis and the rich
country back of it must needs cross the Chicago currents and go to the
north of Lake Erie. The Wabash--one of the least understood and most
abused railroads in America--in those days first began really to justify
the fine strategy of its position. It became the main factor in bringing
St. Louis freight up to Detroit, where it no longer crossed into Canada by
ferry but through the great tunnel which the Michigan Central completed
about twelve or fourteen years ago; and by sweeping easily along through
the gradeless tangents of the Province of Ontario that freight re-entered
the United States at the Niagara frontier, and so on to New York or Boston
by any one of a half a dozen uncongested traffic routes.
These things apparently could not have been done under private management;
at any rate they were not done under private management, although it is
but fair to say that some of the far-sighted railroaders who sat at the
table of the former Railroad War Board--which had attempted at the
eleventh hour to consolidate the lines and so save the obvious perils of
government operation, even as a temporary war measure--had the vision of
these very consolidation economies. They had the vision but not the power.
Too many powerful considerations bore in upon them and bore them down.
Regulation, which was not fair regulation, the inability to finance the
lines with rates fixed and expenses increasing by leaps and by bounds,
competition refusing to bury itself even in emergency, even traditional
jealousy--all these things prevented the Railroad War Board, constituted
by the roads themselves to have a sort of supreme authority, from
accomplishing its real purpose. These things were accomplished by the
United States Railroad Administration and William G. McAdoo, as
director-general of railroads, almost at the very beginning.
* * * * *
I have set down these operating details of the United States Railroad
Administration under its first director-general at some length, not
because of any desire to glorify Mr. McAdoo but because I may want to
refer to them again in the final chapters of this book when I am
endeavoring to show the folly and the waste of many of the phases of our
competitive system of railroading in the United States. Failure as it was
in many ways, the McAdoo episode was perhaps valuable after all as a
laboratory experiment in rail transport. I am not sure but that as such it
was worth every cent that it cost; and its cost was not small. For some
years past, before the coming of the war, a certain proportion of our
railroaders had been getting into something of a rut, to put it lightly.
McAdoo came along and, if he did nothing else, succeeded in shaking them
well out of that rut. Yet it is but fair to recall again that the Railroad
War Board might have done the same thing had it possessed two great powers
that the United States Railroad Administration possessed--absolute
authority and virtually unlimited financial resources. McAdoo, on the one
hand, might order new locomotives by the hundreds and box-cars by the
thousands--no matter what the price, we were at war--and upon the other,
he could--and did--raise the railroad tariffs, both freight and passenger,
to a point hitherto deemed virtually prohibitive. He raised the rates all
the way from 25 to 35 per cent., and the railroads but two or three years
before had found the Interstate Commerce Commission deaf to their appeals
for mere 5 and 10 per cent. advances.
CHAPTER III
THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION (CONTINUED)
I bear no brief for Mr. McAdoo. On the contrary I have been one of his
most persistent, although, I trust, consistent, critics. In the columns of
the "Saturday Evening Post" and other widely circulated publications I
have tried to set down fairly, impartially, and thoroughly both the
accomplishment and the shortcomings of that remarkable organization, the
United States Railroad Administration. And with this final chapter written
I shall close for myself, I hope forever, the recital of its history.
It is but fair to say that even though McAdoo's great economies of
operation through radical consolidation and reroutings were obvious, it
took courage, none the less, to put many of them into effect. Tradition,
the sentiment built up through long years of hot competitive practice,
local pride and local spirit here and there and everywhere, had to be met
and overcome successfully, even though the war-time issue was to come into
the reckoning. McAdoo has never been known for lack of courage. He reached
out here and he reached out there and generally he attained his desires.
"You talk about Fairfax Harrison. Of all the men in authority in
Washington, it was McAdoo who really played the lone hand." So speaks a
man who from the very beginning of the war overseas made a careful study
of the Administration and its human components. He speaks the truth--and
does not.
"The trouble with McAdoo," says a radical who is immensely interested in
the entire railroad situation, "was that he was in the hands of the old
railroad gang and controlled body and soul by them."
He also speaks the truth, and does not. I presume that we may translate
the "old railroad gang" into the group of experienced and very able and
honest railroad executives that the first director-general gathered about
him, and who without exception rendered him efficient service. Mr. McAdoo
himself says this. And he ought to know.
In the preceding chapter we saw some of the sweeping changes and economies
that were wrought in the freight operation of the railroads under
governmental control; the passenger ones were even more dramatic. We have
already seen how at a fell swoop the excellent service between New York
and Washington was smashed almost into smithereens, and how the good
horse-sense of the first director-general came to the rescue then and
there and restored a service that would enable men to travel back and
forth between these cities on their war-time errands in a degree of
comfort sufficient at least to render them best able to carry on their
press of unusual duties. Other services were not so restored. The Broadway
Limited, the crack twenty-hour train of Mr. Rea's Pennsylvania railroad,
was an early sacrifice. In May, 1918, Mr. McAdoo approved of a sweeping
economy in the western portion of the country, the territory west of
Chicago and St. Louis. In this great slash alone estimated yearly savings
of 11,728,000 passenger train-miles were made. These savings were
accomplished chiefly by abandoning duplicate and expensive fast train
services (please also note this for future reference) between Chicago and
the Pacific coast cities and assigning, supposedly to the shortest and
most direct route in each case, the fastest through service. Under this
scheme the Santa Fe became the preferred route between Chicago and Los
Angeles; the quite logical grouping of Chicago and Northwestern, Union
Pacific, and the former Central Pacific division of the Southern Pacific,
from Chicago to San Francisco; the Burlington and the Northern Pacific to
Portland, and the Milwaukee to Seattle.
These selections were made arbitrarily. They cost many heartaches,
however. The Rock Island--the shortest route between Chicago and the
important railroad gateway of El Paso, and but thirty-five miles longer
between Chicago and Los Angeles--watched the decapitation of the Golden
State Limited, which it had worked so hard to upbuild, with feelings of
great bitterness and regret. It felt down in the bottom of its heart that
it had been discriminated against. When peace came again--if ever it
should come again--and the railroads were restored to their private
operators--if they ever were to be restored again--the Golden State
Limited would have to start once again at the very bottom of the ladder.
The most notable consolidations of passenger service under the government
administration came, however, in the central portions of the land. In the
district about Chicago under private and competitive control there was
(and to-day is once again) a great waste of through passenger-train
service. With six competing railroads from Chicago to the Twin Cities, six
to Omaha, six to Kansas City, four to St. Louis, and three to Cincinnati,
and with almost every one of these roads trying to maintain a service as
good as its competitors, if not better, there was and is a vast
preponderance of through passenger-trains, many times to the cost of
weaker or branch lines, even of well-to-do-systems. It is not at all
uncommon for a branch line, particularly if it passes through a
non-competitive district, to be paying with its all-too-few and
overcrowded local trains for the extravagances of the underfilled through
ones upon the main line. The little wheezy locomotive and the two
forty-year-old battered day-coaches of the down local to Willettsburg or
Sand Corners was and still is the upkeep of the lordly limited all-Pullman
and aristocratic from the point of its crack new locomotive to the far tip
of its brass-railed observation-platform. Do not forget that. And also do
not forget that a good proportion of the voting population of any State
lives upon the branch lines, which may have accounted in the past for some
pretty radical railroad legislation and regulation. Here is a point that
the average railroad operator, with his nose close down to freight
ton-miles, may overlook. He may have and frankly express a contempt for
the passenger service but it is at all times the chief point of actual
contact between the railroad and its patrons.
* * * * *
Moreover from Chicago to the group of cities a night's ride distant from
it in several directions the plethora of superb trains moved in
competitive squadrons. By that I mean, even though there were on four
railroads between that city and St. Louis before the coming of the war
fifteen fast through trains in each direction, there were to all practical
purposes but three or four. For competition so bunched the trains that
there was an important group of through expresses leaving Chicago at noon
and another important group at midnight, with two or three less important
slower expresses at nine in the morning and again at nine in the evening.
An intelligent centralized management would seemingly have found it
possible so to distribute fifteen through trains that there would have
been a through train from Chicago to St. Louis--or the reverse--almost
each workaday hour. The through service between New York and Washington
and between New York and Boston is so distributed.
Even under centralized control, however, such an even distribution of
passenger-trains between midland cities of the United States is not
entirely possible. For even in the case which we have before us, there are
important connections to be reckoned with, both at Chicago and at St.
Louis. These trains must be met, and if the best through passenger-trains
for the Southwest leave the St. Louis Union Station at about nine o'clock
in the evening, the resident of Decatur, which is on the main line of the
Wabash, and of Springfield, which is on the main line of the Chicago and
Alton, should in all fairness have an equal chance at them.
Yet, despite this hindering factor, the McAdoo centralized authority
succeeded in cutting the fifteen through trains in each direction down to
nine and in slightly spreading the leaving times. The result apparently
worked little hardship to the through traveler of war-time days between
Chicago and St. Louis. The train on which he rode might be a little longer
and a little better filled than usual, but its running-time and its
equipment, save for the probable elimination of the observation-car, were
virtually unchanged. And 15,706 train-miles and 9,538 tons of coal were
being saved in Chicago-St. Louis passenger service each month.
But how about Monticello?
Monticello, Illinois, is not a big town, as big towns go. Yet it is an
enterprising county-seat of some 2,000 people situated on the Chicago-St.
Louis main line of the Wabash just a few miles north of Decatur. And it
has definite rights. Do not forget that. In the old days of ante-bellum
private control--sin-filled and really wasteful competitive control--there
were four through trains and two locals through Monticello in each
direction each day. And the Monticello banker or merchant who wanted to
run down to St. Louis and come back at night had an easy affair of it. But
with the government train consolidation he could get up in the middle of
the night and catch the 2:30 train south or else wait for the next express
at 4:05 in the afternoon. The Government was not particularly worried
about him.
Let me repeat. Monticello has definite rights to adequate railroad
transportation. And this holds true whether that transportation comes from
the Government or the individual. Monticello--ten thousand Monticellos, if
you please--has a considerable voting population. And once the real war
emergency was passed and the Armistice safely signed, ten thousand
Monticellos began asking if government operation was going to offer them
no better relief from the ills of private operation. It was as nothing to
them that there had been a saving of trains and of train mileage between
Chicago and St. Louis with no apparent diminution of the service between
those two metropolitan cities; they simply knew that there had been a
great lessening of their own service. And while they were willing to
accept such a lessening as a part of their war sacrifice they did not
intend to accept it as a permanent transportation condition, either from
the Government or from private capital.
This general plan held, however. There are some pretty big and powerful
Monticellos between Chicago and the coast. Denver is one of them, Omaha is
another, Kansas City a third. And because, to make a single instance, any
one of these cities demands a fairly quick and efficient service to
Portland and the Puget Sound points, it was necessary after a time to
modify to some extent the simplified route plan and to give these
intermediate points through train service, or at least through Pullman
service.
These changes and others like them have brought great savings in passenger
mileage. That cannot be denied, even though one is tempted to add a
doubting corollary as to the shattering of the finest passenger service
that any land ever has received. The war crisis demanded curtailments. The
railroads themselves had recognized that, even before the coming of the
McAdoo administration. From May 1, 1917, up to the end of that year their
War Board succeeded in reducing the passenger service by 28,656,983
train-miles. Yet this was not a circumstance to the slashing done by the
Federal Administration. In September, 1918, McAdoo reported to President
Wilson that he had succeeded in eliminating passenger-trains to the extent
of 47,420,000 additional miles a year, a really astounding total.
But in all probability the most popular economy of this sort that McAdoo
succeeded in bringing about was in the consolidation of passenger
terminals across the land, all the way from the biggest towns down to the
very smallest. He began at the top in the city of New York. The
Pennsylvania railroad since the opening of its wonderful new station in
Seventh Avenue in that city in November, 1910, quite naturally had held it
exclusively for itself and for its subsidiary, the Long Island railroad.
In that tight stand it was right from every competitive point of view. It
had taken the great engineering problem and its financial risk entirely
upon its own shoulders; shrewd railroaders had shaken their heads
dubiously as they contemplated the daring move; and there was no reason
why it should share the fruits of its enterprise with its competitors.
But the competitive situation had been eliminated. Therefore McAdoo did
not hesitate in personally ordering that the highly competitive Baltimore
and Ohio, as well as the non-competitive Lehigh Valley (which up to that
time had been using the old Pennsylvania station in Jersey City), should
bring its through trains into the Pennsylvania terminal on Manhattan
Island. (Incidentally, at the eleventh hour of the existence of the
Railroad War Board the Pennsylvania had proffered the use of its station
for this purpose.) The tickets of the B. & O. and the Pennsylvania between
New York and Washington and intermediate points were moreover made
completely interchangeable.
The Pennsylvania people did not enjoy these orders, even though they had
proffered the station at New York. But they were good soldiers. The
country was at war, and they complied readily with war-time orders, no
matter how unreasonable they may have seemed to them.
In a similar fashion the Southern Pacific people made wry faces over the
order that admitted the Santa Fe into their ancient train-shed and "mole"
at Oakland, opposite San Francisco. Their position was not so well taken
however. Even in the competitive era the fast ferry-boats of the Santa Fe,
coming from its rail terminal at Richmond, had entered the same terminal
with the S. P. at San Francisco--the great union ferry-house at the foot
of Market Street. And had not the Santa Fe, as the longer route, been
compelled as a war measure to sacrifice its two pet trains between San
Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego, the precious Saint and the Angel?
These consolidations--there were many similar ones in the freight
terminals as well--went on all the way across the land. Where there were
two or more engine-houses in a place fairly close together, and it was
humanly possible so to do, they were consolidated. Trackage at terminals
was simplified; for instance at Chicago the trains of the Baltimore and
Ohio and Pere Marquette systems, which formerly had entered their
passenger stations by a rather circuitous route, were now sent in to them
over the tracks of the Pennsylvania, and a saving of approximately seven
miles and forty minutes of running time made.
Certain captious critics of Mr. McAdoo's constructive policies have seen
in these terminal and other physical consolidations of the several
carriers a deep-laid plot to "scramble the railroad eggs," which means so
to weld the properties together that they could not be easily separated
again. Despite the fact that the "unscrambling" has indeed been no
particularly easy task, I do not see in McAdoo the deep-dyed villain that
so many others perceive. I think that he consolidated these terminals and
other operating devices in the interest of real war-time efficiency and
economy, and for no other reason. That would seem at this time to be an
impartial verdict upon his actions.
I am also setting these things down in some detail because they too are
essential to a proper understanding of the final results of the nation's
first sweeping experiment in centralized and governmental railroad
control. The most of these operating economies were the accomplishments of
the Railroad Administration of the sort which some time ago I
characterized as obvious. Now consider a few of them that were
strange--marvelously strange, you may prefer to put it:
The Railroad Administration sought as one of the first of its economies
the consolidation of the various city ticket-offices that competition long
ago had set out in the larger cities of the land, as well as the complete
abolition of the so-called "off the line" offices--agencies in cities more
or less remote from the actual territory of any given railroad. So far, so
good. So far was obvious and sensible economy. If an office here and an
office there had been retained for the essential travel needs of the
roads and their office forces and furniture had been brought together
wherever it was necessary, the others being either abandoned or
temporarily closed, there would have been no complaint. But the "winning
of the war" took the strange effect in most of the large cities of the
land that the Railroad Administration hired new office space--in Chicago
it took virtually the entire ground-floor of a huge new sky-scraper on a
ten-year lease at $65,000 a year--and installed elaborate and expensive
new mahogany office equipment. In New York alone four of these great new
offices were fitted out, and many of the smaller and cheaper offices,
abandoned, stood idle for months, while the rent went merrily forward.
These things were inexcusable. So were many others. Apparently the
ordinarily astute first director-general made a great mistake at the
outset. He did not realize perhaps that he was attempting to do two things
at once--trying to solve an acute war problem as well as a great economic
one that had been gathering urgency for nearly a decade before the coming
of the World War. That at least is a kind construction to place upon his
policy. And if it was indeed his policy it was not so very different from
that which was followed those days by many other large activities down at
Washington. Apparently we have not yet learned that almost any war problem
is separate and distinct from those of our great social economic questions
that are forever showing themselves in one form or another. For instance a
good many of us confused the problems of the capitalization and labor of
the railroads with that of taking them over as an emergency war measure,
just as we repeatedly mixed up all sorts of social and economic problems
with the making of an emergency war revenue tax.
Such apparently is also a fair construction to place upon Mr. McAdoo's
remarkable activities in setting great forces of designers and draftsmen
at work to create new "standardized" locomotives and cars for our
temporarily nationalized railroad system. He made a widely circulated
statement that he had found "2303 different styles of freight-cars and
almost as many different descriptions of locomotives" and that these
presently would be reduced by his experts to twelve standard types of
freight-cars, and to six standard types of locomotives of two weights
each. Unquestionably our railroad freight equipment has stood and still
stands greatly in need of much standardization, although the roads
themselves long ago established enough of this to permit common operation
of their cars. But I doubt if such a standardization program had any real
part in an emergency war plan. I never have been able to reason that out
to my own satisfaction.
Nevertheless McAdoo was satisfied with his own idea and in 1918 alone
ordered 1430 of his standard locomotives and about 100,000 of the
freight-cars, at prices enormously above those of peace days. The engines
and the cars eventually were delivered. That they were good engines and
good cars I do not doubt. But they have never enjoyed any marked
popularity with the railroad operating people. They are a conservative
lot, these old hard-shell railroad executives who still hang on to a
remarkable degree all the way across the land. You cannot lead them easily
to new ways of thought.
All these fine frills, introduced in the midst of one of the most acute
national crises ever visited upon this country, cost the Railroad
Administration much time and much money--much useless time and much money
that might have been used to better advantage in other directions. Digress
for a moment with me and compare the great and bulky operations of the
Railroad Administration with those of its prototype across the Atlantic,
the war-created Railway Executive Committee of England.
The war wreaked no ravages elsewhere in England more striking than those
that were wreaked upon her railways. She was quick to realize the supreme
importance of her rail carriers to her in her crisis. And so she reached
out within a fortnight after the outrage of Louvain and, with the
authority that had been given her long years before by Parliament, took
over the rail lines and began operating them for the national weal. There
was no policy of vacillation on her part. It was a situation that she had
anticipated and solved several years before the coming of the war.
Even before 1912 there was in existence an English body known as the War
Council of the Engineer and Railway Staff Corps. This council consisted of
the general managers (in England the post of general manager compares with
that of the president of an American railroad) of the railways that in the
event of war with a Continental power would have the most to do with
military traffic. The council made elaborate and definite war plans. The
possible invasion of the east coast was anticipated and detailed
plans--even to the working out of actual train and engine schedules--were
made for the evacuation if necessary of the population of east coast towns
and cities and the movement of troops and heavy guns up to them. This
council by 1912 had developed into the Railway Executive Committee, which
was composed of the general managers of the twelve most important railway
systems of Great Britain. It in turn formed an integral part of a Board of
Communications, which included representatives of the War Office, the
Admiralty, the Board of Trade, and the Home Office. Among these
representatives was Sir Eric Geddes, then first lord of the Admiralty, a
young Englishman of great promise and energy and to-day the British
minister of transport.
The Railway Executive Committee went to its job quickly and without
ostentation. While it sought to unify the operation of John Bull's
railways so that he might help win the war most efficiently and most
promptly, it had no false or grandiloquent ideas of creating a single
national rail system overnight. It did not seek to tear down in a day what
had taken the patient labor of years to upbuild. It sought not to
standardize either baggage-cars or locomotives or dining-car meals. It
even escaped having a director-general. Its printed forms were few and
modest. It had no press-agent, no propaganda. Few people outside of
railway and army circles even knew of its existence. At the height of its
endeavors it employed in its joint efforts a total force of not more than
eighteen officers and clerks, who occupied two floors of a very small
office-building directly across the way from the Houses of Parliament. It
was an extremely simple enterprise. But it functioned and functioned
extremely well.
Eighteen employees, as against more than twelve hundred at the very
beginning of the United States Railroad Administration. Even to-day, two
years after it has ceased to function, there are still several hundred
retainers faithfully hanging on to their official jobs.
Mr. McAdoo might find some shrewd lawyer's way of proving his
"standardized" locomotives and freight-cars a necessity for the winning of
the war, even though the elaborate consolidated ticket-offices would not
be so easy to explain. But just why orders should have emanated from his
offices to place his name as well as his title upon every piece of printed
matter issued by the United States Railroad Administration--even to the
dining-car menus and even to each third mile upon the scrip-books issued
for passenger travel--is particularly difficult to understand.
Particularly so, as a war measure in a war for democracy, at any rate. The
hub of the troubles with Mr. McAdoo seems to have been that he regarded a
war crisis as a fit moment for an experiment in the details of a
centralized railroad operation for the United States.
* * * * *
The chief criticism launched against the first director-general of the
Railroad Administration is in regard to his handling of railroad labor.
The more conservative the mind that you scratch upon this extremely
delicate topic the more violent the immediate reaction. "Barron's Weekly,"
published by the "Wall Street Journal," regards Mr. McAdoo's attitude
toward railroad labor as that of an arch-tyrant. But that is merely
typical Wall Street attitude and to be dismissed as such. I had, as I have
already said, very little sympathy with the director-general's addresses
to the men at Pueblo and at El Paso, where he assured them that at last
they had come into the rights which had been denied them and that
hereafter they were to receive the square deal. That was unnecessary. More
than unnecessary, it was unfair. And more than that, it was an extremely
dangerous doctrine to be preaching, particularly at that time. I cannot
see how it possibly could do one single thing toward upbuilding railroad
morale, the thing needed at that moment more than anything else. It could
scarcely do else than lower that shattered morale still further. And it is
possible that Mr. McAdoo regrets at this moment that he ever gave
utterance to those two speeches, patting railroad labor on the back when
railroad labor should have been congratulating itself that it was not
conscripted and sent into the trenches. This is said with all deference
and with a high regard for railroad labor in the United States.
On the other hand McAdoo did a most commendable and forward-looking thing
when he gave labor a fair place in his official cabinet. Then and there he
played a trump card that private ownership and operation of our railroads
forever and a day had failed to play. He played another when at the very
beginning of his term of office he put the entire question of wages in the
hands of a competent commission headed by the late Franklin K. Lane, of
whose fairness and ability there could be no question whatsoever. Mr. Lane
knew men; he also knew railroads. He was perhaps the one man in the United
States who might have taken the Railroad Administration and made an
unqualified success of it. The ablest member of the Wilson cabinet, he was
compelled to take a back seat in the big war drama. His capabilities and
his experience were virtually ignored.
The Lane Commission went more carefully into the question of railroad
wages than any one had ever before gone. It did what no individual
railroad or group of railroads ever had the intelligence or the courage or
the fairness to do--attempted to make some sort of impartial analysis of
living costs to the railroader, and to use these as a basis for the fixing
of his wage. The question of compensation never has been placed upon a
scientific basis.
The whole question was so big and so vital that even despite war-time
pressure the Lane Commission took until May, 1918, to render its decision
in favor of considerable increases to almost every type and rank of
railroad worker. It unquestionably was a fair decision. Some that followed
may not have been so fair; McAdoo unquestionably was led far afield
himself by some of his advisers in elaborate and almost absurd attempts at
standardized wage and working agreements. Yet at the time he took over the
railroads for the Government the rank and file of railroaders
unquestionably were underpaid--in certain cases grossly underpaid, and
with their living costs rising by leaps and by bounds.
This entire question of railroad labor, its rights and its wage, is so
involved and so complicated in detail that I am going to leave it for
another portion of this book. It is enough to say here in review of the
McAdoo administration that on December 15, 1917, thirteen days before he
assumed control, the total number of employees upon the Class I roads of
the land (87 per cent. of the railroad mileage of the country; all save
the lines with gross revenues of less than a million dollars a year) was
1,703,685; on January 15, 1919, four days after he had relinquished
control, it had grown to 1,843,530--an increase of 139,846, or 8.2 per
cent. Yet the pay-roll expense, which had been 61.48 per cent. of all
operating costs in 1917, had only risen to 65.62 per cent. It was not
until the following year that an average increase of nearly 50 per cent.
in railroad wages was granted, in the face of a still generally increasing
cost of living.
But by the next year McAdoo was out of the job. The Armistice had been
signed on November 11, 1918, and immediately thereafter Mr. Wilson gave
heed to Mr. McAdoo's protestations that, the war-time emergency having
passed, he was no longer needed and that he must go out into the world to
recoup his shattered personal fortune. Accordingly he ceased to be
director-general of the United States Railroad Administration on January
11, 1919, and was immediately succeeded by his right-hand assistant,
Walker D. Hines, whom we have seen already as the one-time chairman of the
board of the immensely important Santa Fe railway system.
Hines is in many ways the very antithesis of McAdoo. There is nothing
dramatic or spectacular about him whatever. On the contrary he is what he
began to be, a typical corporation lawyer, cool-headed, judicial, shrewd,
and honest. He probably would tell you himself that he broadened a good
deal down in the offices of the Railroad Administration. I could see the
changes. He became vastly more human; his Washington experience seemed to
quicken his sympathies and to broaden his understanding of men.
His job was vastly different from that of McAdoo. The job, like the man,
now lacked fireworks. There were no longer troops and their munitions to
be moved double-quick to the seaboard; instead there was the rather
leisurely return of the boys in khaki to their homes. Industrial
production across the land was slackening, not quickly but appreciably.
Oddly enough, however, railroad revenues still were increasing; they were
not to reach their peak until near the end of 1920. Total operating
revenues of the Class I roads, which were $4,014,142,743 in 1917, and
which had increased to $4,880,953,480 in 1918, came to $5,144,795,154 in
1919. In 1920 they reached, under the stimulus of tariff increases ranging
from 20 to 50 per cent., the enormous summit total of $6,171,493,301. In
the first ten months of 1921, the most recent figures at hand, they were
but $4,672,651,346, as compared with $5,082,819,687 for the same ten
months of 1920.
It was under the Hines administration that most of the national working
agreements were made, to which the private railroad operators were to take
such extreme exception after the return of the properties to their
control. But again I must ask you to defer comment or criticism until we
have taken up the entire question of railroad labor as a sizable problem
by itself. It is enough to say here that Hines encountered a very
considerable opposition when he raised wages generously, and raised rates
not at all.
The fact remains, nevertheless, that Mr. Hines had in his stewardship a
very thankless job at the best; it is always hard to follow a prima donna
upon the stage. And McAdoo was some prima donna! Yet in loyalty and in
energy Hines gave place to no one. He took the thankless job and made the
best of it. He undermined his health by his devotion to it and received no
praise from any quarter. His best reward must come in his own knowledge
that, all in all, he did a good job, with difficult timber--the best of
the subordinates of the Railroad Administration already were leaving it
for future peace-time jobs of permanency--and with no encouragement
whatsoever. And when the United States Railroad Administration ceased its
active career upon March 1, 1920, and handed the railroads back to their
owners for operation, I fancy that none was more rejoiced than Walker D.
Hines.
What then was the net result of our first--and possibly our last--national
experiment in the government operation of our huge railroad plant?
Even to-day, fully twenty-four months removed from the experiment itself,
that is a difficult question to answer quickly and fairly. It is even
difficult to say that, regarded merely as an experiment, it was a fair
test. Certainly no laboratory expert deliberately would choose the
critical final hours of a great war as an ideal time for dispassionate
experimentation. It was in such hours that McAdoo, who was the head and
front of the entire experiment, worked. When his successor came to high
office the entire country was in the "let-down" that swept across the land
as the very natural sequence of great national tension and endeavor.
The distinguished writer upon railroad economies, William J. Cunningham,
James J. Hill professor of transportation at Harvard and himself for a
time a subordinate executive of the Railroad Administration, does not
believe that the experiment was a success. In a recent issue of the
"Quarterly Journal of Economics" he says:
Finally we ask ourselves whether our recent experiment in Federal
control affords an adequate test of the desirability of a permanent
policy of public ownership and management. The answer is plainly in
the negative. The results in 1918 were favorable. In 1919 they were
unfavorable. They were favorable in 1918 because at that time we were
actively engaged in war, every influence of patriotism supported the
Railroad Administration, and the organization was held at concert
pitch by the critical military needs. The unfavorable results in 1919
may be attributed in greater part to the pronounced reaction from
war-time strain, to the serious decline in traffic, and to the
disintegration of the organization in a too prolonged closing period.
No one should question the expediency of the Government's action in
taking the railroads in the emergency. The centralization of power and
the more effective coordination with other branches of the Government
in the crisis made possible effective results in the utilization of
equipment and facilities, which would have been much more difficult
under private management. But it is not proper to treat that period as
the test of what might be expected under normal conditions. As regards
the unfavorable year, 1919, it would be as unfair to make that a test
of government operation as it would be to take the present period of
subnormal traffic and disturbed economic conditions as the final test
of private management.
Those who advocate nationalization and look upon the results of both
years as favorable to government operation must concede that they are
to be credited to railroad men who rose to the emergency. The
proponents of nationalization who are disappointed in the results of
the two years attribute the failures to the fact that the real
management during the greater part of Federal control was in the hands
of men who were brought up under private management and who therefore
could not or would not avail themselves of the advantages of
unification.
It is plain therefore that nothing definite can be proved from the
results of 1918-19. A real test of government operation is possible
only if carried on over a longer period--one in which business
conditions are normal and in which political expediency would have
normal play. The period under review was so abnormal that the results
are valueless as guides to what might be expected from similar control
or complete government ownership when normal conditions return.
I do not agree entirely with Professor Cunningham. I am not a "government
ownership (or operation) man," but I feel that the experiment of the
United States Railroad Administration, despite the tremendously difficult
conditions under which it was operated, and also despite the fact that it
was made at a very inopportune and inappropriate time, did have much real
value. Unquestionably the time set for the experiment was far too short.
Both Mr. McAdoo and Mr. Hines went on public record as saying that there
be at least five years of peace to show their plan at its full worth.
But even in twenty-six brief and hectic months many things were developed
that should be, that must be eventually, of great value to the present
private operators of our railroads. Of many of these things as well as the
possibilities for their development, this book will have to tell. The
Railroad Administration at least pointed the way to them. In view of that,
shall we not be broad enough to overlook its errors and its mistakes, and
yet call it a real advance toward the solution of a national problem that
advances sluggishly to that end?
CHAPTER IV
THE RETURN OF PRIVATE OPERATION
Before the roads could be actually handed back to their owners for
operation once more, it was highly necessary of course that a definite
plan be formulated, not only for the method of transfer but for the
protection of the roads against the deficit that was piling up steadily
against them. Congress, which hates to be definite about anything,
wrestled with the problem through dreary and seemingly endless weeks, and
then in the last few days--nay, even hours--before the date set for the
return of the properties--March 1, 1920--passed the hastily constructed
and far from satisfactory Transportation Act, which speedily went to
President Wilson at the White House and there was signed by him.
There has been so much discussion, so much argument pro and con, about
this measure that I am going to present a carefully made resume of it,
originally prepared for a group of business men who sought to make a most
impartial study of the measure. The act itself provides that the railroads
of the United States shall be operated by private corporations under a
comprehensive system of government regulation. One of the very best things
about the act is that in its very essence it represents a fair
interpretation of the feeling of the majority of the American people after
two years of government operation. That that majority did not take into
account the great difficulties under which both McAdoo and Hines worked is
not germane to the present point. It saw their mistakes--the waste as well
as the many efficiencies of the Railroad Administration--and it demanded a
prompt return to private operation. Under the pressure of this public
opinion--some of it very skilfully aided, to be sure, by inspired
propagandists--the members of Congress who framed the Transportation Act
were almost unanimous in their honest belief that in the hands of private
corporations the railroads could be operated more economically and more
efficiently and would give better service than would be possible under
government operation. The Transportation Act came as a very natural
sequence to such a belief.
* * * * *
The most important provisions of the act are:
(1) That on March 1, 1920, Federal operation shall cease and the
railroads shall be returned to private operation.
(2) That under a new rule of rate-making the railroads shall be
assured adequate revenues; and adequacy shall be defined in the first
two years as a net return of 5-1/2 or 6 per cent. on the fair value of
the property as determined by governmental authority.
(3) That during the transition period the Government shall aid in
restoring the financial stability and the credit of the railroads:
(a) by continuing the government guaranty of a standard return for
six months after the roads are returned to their owners;
(b) by creating a revolving fund of $300,000,000 from which the
roads may obtain under certain conditions short-term loans to meet
their most pressing needs;
(c) by extending the carrier indebtedness for capital expenditures
made by the government during Federal control for a period of ten
years with interest at 6 per cent.; and
(d) by the creation of a reserve fund containing one-half of the
excess earnings of those railroads whose net earnings exceed the 6
per cent. specified in the rule of rate-making.
(4) That the rates and services of interstate carriers shall continue
to be regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission; that the
commission shall be enlarged by the addition of two new members,
making eleven in all; and that the commission shall have authority:
(a) to make inquiry continuously concerning the transportation
facilities and services of the whole country, and when and how they
should be improved; the state of the credit of all common carriers;
and the new capital which the public interest may require any
carrier to secure;
(b) to permit the consolidation of two or more carriers provided
that such consolidation is in harmony with a comprehensive plan
(previously adopted by the commission) for consolidating all of the
railroads of the country in a limited number of strong competing
systems, and also provided that, in the opinion of the commission,
the proposed consolidation is in the public interest;
(c) to fix interstate rates that shall be just, reasonable, and
adequate;
(d) to determine the valuation of railroad property;
(e) to prescribe a uniform accounting system for all carriers;
(f) to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over capital expenditures and
the issuance of securities by carriers;
(g) to prohibit the extension of present lines or the construction
or acquisition of new lines by any carrier until it has obtained
from the commission a certificate of public necessity and
convenience;
(h) to require the construction of docks and rail connections
between rail and water carriers;
(i) to provide when necessary for the redistribution of traffic and
for joint use of terminals;
(j) to exercise jurisdiction over the use, control, and supply as
well as the movement, distribution, and interchange of locomotives
and cars and also over the supply, movement, and operation of
trains; and
(k) to order a carrier to install automatic train-stop or
train-control devices.
(5) That the wages and working conditions of railroad employees shall
be regulated by a Railroad Labor Board composed of three
representatives of the carriers, three representatives of the
employees, and three representatives of the public; and that disputes
between the carriers and their employees in regard to rules or working
conditions may be referred to railroad boards of labor
adjustment--local, regional, or national--voluntarily organized
between the roads and their employees, or if such boards are not
voluntarily formed, such disputes shall be decided by the Railroad
Labor Board.
Like almost all hastily constructed and compromise measures the
Transportation Act falls considerably short of being an entirely
satisfactory solution of a difficult problem. Perhaps the best that can be
said of it is that it is probably the best that could be expected out of
Congress. It is not fair as yet to assume that it is a failure. But on the
other hand how can it be to-day accounted a real success? It has not
returned to the carriers its promised 6 per cent. upon their capital.
Please notice that I say "promised," not "guaranteed." The last word is
incorrectly used in too many instances. The Transportation Act endeavors
to fix rates that will bring in 5-1/2 or 6 per cent. to the railroads; at
no time does it _guarantee_ them. And even this set figure of 5-1/2 to 6
per cent. expired March 1, 1922, two years after the enactment of the
statute. Thereafter the adequacy of the return is left to the judgment of
the Interstate Commerce Commission. Quite a difference from a 6 per cent.
guarantee!
To-day railroad stocks lie virtually inert within the market. Gun-shy
investors in Wall Street, and elsewhere too, will have nothing of them.
They know the facts. Despite the radical advances made in both passenger
and freight-rates since the adoption of the much-heralded Transportation
Act, earnings have not measurably increased. The slight net return earned
in the last ten months of 1920--but 3.3 per cent., as against the expected
6 per cent.--was wiped out by the poor business of the first two months of
1921; with the result that the net result of the first twelvemonth of
private operation was an actual slight deficit. As a year, 1921 was
absolutely the worst in the history of American railroading. The total net
return for the twelve months ending November 1, 1921, was less than 2.75
per cent.--considerably less than the promised 6, or even 5-1/2.
The situation to-day is hardly improved, despite desperate efforts on the
part of the roads to reduce their operating expenses. What they have
accomplished along these lines, aside from a further lowering of the
reduced service that they are rendering these days, is shown in the fact
that by June, 1921, they had brought their wages and transportation costs
to eighty-two cents out of each dollar that they earn, and by October it
was seventy-four cents. Less than a year before this was slightly over
ninety-five cents. By the present time it is just above seventy. The roads
themselves are now inclined to attribute much of their financial
depression to two things; to the vast industrial slump with its obvious
effect upon their revenues, and to their huge pay-rolls. Ingeniously they
argued this last point before the Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago in
the early summer of 1921 and succeeded in getting a cut of some
$500,000,000 in their huge annual wage-bill. But the average railroader of
the rank and file still is paid considerably over 100 per cent. more than
in 1913. (In exact figures his average pay to-day--on an eight-hour day
basis--is $1700 for the twelvemonth, as compared with $761 nine years
ago.) This is the figure, along with the figures representing his
increased fuel and tax and material costs, that he uses when he justifies
the increase of his carrying charges.
Yet the potent fact remains that the high rates are not only not
attracting business but actually are driving it away. The long-haul use of
the motor-truck, to which I shall refer in more detail in due time, is not
due in these days of industrial depression to a lack of box-cars or to
yard congestion, but is a protest against the existing rates. And that the
railroads themselves are not deaf to these protests is shown by the fact
that under the guise of "revising" their freight charges they are actually
beginning to lower them. I am inclined to the belief that the partial
failure at least of the Transportation Act must have taught all the wise
men at Washington, and also a goodly number of our fairly wise
railroaders, one distinct thing: You can lead a horse to water but you
cannot make him drink. Which, being freely translated, means that you can
raise railroad rates to a point where traffic begins to fade away, to find
other pathways for itself, or to cease altogether. This is particularly
true of passenger rates. A nation-wide rate of more than three and
one-half cents a mile, with a heavy increase in the Pullman rates to keep
pace, is not a particular inducement to travelers. Moreover the persistent
refusal of our railroads to create a lower class of fares than the
standard, with a slightly lowered quality of service, give the would-be
traveler of modest means no alternative whatever, except possibly to ride
in a small motor-car, or to stay at home. A good many of them are riding
in motor-cars these days; and a good many more are staying at home. The
passenger revenue of our railroads in 1921 was 23 per cent. less than in
the preceding year. Which is commended to the attention of official
Washington.
Consider now the railroads handed back on March 1, 1920, to their old-time
owners--Fairfax Harrison returning from his temporary habitat at Richmond
to his familiar offices in the Southern Railway building in the city of
Washington, Mr. Rea, Mr. Willard, Mr. Underwood, and others who were
temporarily deposed from power triumphantly returning to it. Triumph is
the word. The Southern signalized its return to its own by having its new
time-tables, fashioned with their familiar yellow covers and with the
odious words, "United States Railroad Administration," glaringly missing,
ready upon that memorable first day of March. It did more. Upon its lines
it terminated instanter the use of the Railroad's Administration passes
which had been given rather freely to the henchmen of that branch of
Federal service. Other roads quickly ended the life of those passes; but
generally gave their holders time to get home with them. Not so with the
Southern. For it the U. S. R. A. cardboards ended their value at midnight
on February 29, 1920. After that they were good as souvenirs, and as
nothing else. The unlucky wight who chanced to hold one, and no other
pass, paid his fare from midnight on.
Personal feelings again came into play. One Federal manager of an Eastern
railroad, who had had the audacity to move his former chief, the
corporation's president, out of an office that the old man loved, lost his
job for his temerity. He was not the only executive who lost his job. R.
H. Aishton, who had been president of the Chicago and Northwestern railway
at the time of the creation of the United States Railroad Administration,
and whose rare ability as an operating executive had been recognized by
McAdoo in his appointment to the post of the regional director at Chicago,
did not return to his old position. It is understood that he incurred the
disfavor of Marvin Hughitt.
Mr. Hughitt is the last of the old guard of American railroad executives.
He was born near Auburn, New York, in 1837, has lived in Illinois since
1854, and at eighty-five years of age is still the active controlling
influence in the great Northwestern property. He has, to my knowledge, but
one senior in the whole business, Chauncey M. Depew, chairman of the board
of the New York Central railroad, who is eighty-nine years old; but Mr.
Depew long since was very glad to relinquish the reins of operating detail
of that great Vanderbilt property to younger and more energetic men.
Not so with Mr. Hughitt. His grip upon the Northwestern has been a firm
one indeed. He has held his road to many old-time traditions. The
lemon-yellow color of its passenger-coaches; the English fashion that it
has of running its trains to the left upon double-track and not to the
right, as is the ordinary American fashion; its generous, not to say
profuse, local and suburban service--all of these are Hughitt. Since the
death of the late Henry Clay Frick of Pittsburg and New York some years
ago, there has been no one to oppose him. Frick could and frequently did.
It is hard to conceive of any one successfully opposing Mr. Frick.
With Mr. Hughitt absolute dictator of Chicago and Northwestern there was
none to oppose his arbitrary dictum in regard to Mr. Aishton. The fact
that Aishton had been reared upon the property, that his record upon it
was not only good but great, apparently counted for nothing. He was
dropped. He had offended "the old man." That was a heinous offense for
which there was no possible excuse. Aishton's powerful friends in the
railroad world rallied to his defense. They elected him president of the
American Railway Association at a salary reputed to be equal to that paid
him by the Northwestern.
Apparently it is not only McAdoo who can afford to indulge his whim in
personalities.
Before the Railroad Administration ceased its actual operation of the
roads it began the restoration of much of the pre-war service,
particularly of the passenger service. Soon after the signing of the
Armistice and the removal of military pressure upon the carriers the
important through trains that had been removed--the Broadway Limited and
the Congressional chief among them--were returned to their former
schedules, although not in every case with the same high degree of service
as before. It was not, for instance, until the return of private control
that the fastest trains between Chicago and the Pacific coast brought to
their pre-war standard of approximately sixty-nine hours. The McAdoo
administration as a war measure had lengthened this schedule to
seventy-two hours.
Yet it was McAdoo who, once the war emergency was passed, removed the
half-cent-a-mile extra charge that he had established against people who
rode in Pullmans or other forms of sleeping and parlor-cars and left the
fare at a flat three cents a mile--where it should have been suffered to
remain in the interest of the railroads themselves.
The Interstate Commerce Commission raised it to 3.6 cents a mile, upon
hints from the private operators of the roads. It is but fair to add,
however, that there are certain members of the commission who long ago had
conceived the idea that the passenger-rates were not bearing their proper
burden of the costs of railroad operation. It is these men who have to-day
steeled their hearts against any lowering of passenger-rates to a point
where the service might at least have some competitive attraction against
that of the automobile, publicly or privately owned or operated. In all
this discussion at the moment of the possible lowering of freight-rates
nothing whatever is being breathed of a readjustment of passenger-fares,
with the single exception of a recent bill passed in the United States
Senate for the enactment of a Federal statute compelling the roads to sell
mileage-books at a low wholesale rate. This neglect of itself is, I think,
a most unhealthy sign. While the 23 per cent. lowering of passenger
revenues in 1921 as against 1920 is a fairly definite expression of that
unhealthiness.
To my mind this is not entirely a question of the proper equalization of
operating costs to revenues; the question of setting the tariffs of
charges to a point where business shall again be attracted to the
railroads, to my way of thought, is the real kernel of the problem. That
is the way that the average merchant or manufacturer would look at the
similar problems that confront him. To get the business the rates must be
made attractive. If it then becomes necessary to reduce operating costs so
as to exist at the lowered revenues, then the business man will move
heaven and earth to reduce his costs.
Apparently the Interstate Commerce Commission does not see the question in
this light. One understanding the complexion of its membership would
hardly expect it so to see it. The commission is absolutely honest and, to
a large extent, able; but it is generally dull. It has no traffic sense;
no sense of salesmanship. It has no vision. It always looks backward,
rarely forward. Being composed almost exclusively of lawyers,--long ago it
was recognized apparently that it would be a fearful thing to place an
honest, far-sighted, energetic railroad executive in its personnel,--it
spends a great deal of time seeking for precedent. Therefore it hardly can
be expected to look forward.
"What _is_ the precedent?" it keeps asking. "How has it always been done
in the past?"
This is one of the very great reasons why our railroads to-day are not
marching forward in step with the progress of the other great businesses
of America, why so often they are called, and with such a deadly truth,
"the sick man of American business," why they have lost so much of public
confidence and of public support, why the morale not only of the rank and
file but of many of the executives as well has come to so low a pass.
The railroads of the United States to-day, deprived of so much of their
initiative by the Government, should at least be able to look to that
Government for some real qualities of inspiration and of leadership. Such
qualities they need. Such qualities are not being given to them. The sick
man needs medicine, physical and mental, not abuse. The Interstate
Commerce Commission should be made into a doctor who can cure as most good
doctors do cure these days, not by nostrums alone, but by good cheer and
inspiration.
* * * * *
One or two things more, if you please, before we are done with this
chapter.
The railroads generally wormed themselves out of the joint terminal
arrangements which McAdoo had made for them, and made in almost every
instance to the great comfort of the traveling public. The Southern
Pacific expelled the offensive big Santa Fe and the almost equally
offensive little Western Pacific from its ancient station and "mole" at
Oakland opposite San Francisco. The Pennsylvania prepared to do the same
thing with the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh Valley at its station in
New York. This last move was not carried out. I had something to do myself
with preventing it.
The question arose in my mind at the termination of Federal operation:
What will the Pennsylvania do with its chief competitor there in its fine
station upon Manhattan Island? Will it do the obviously competitive thing
and thrust the Baltimore and Ohio out, along with the Lehigh Valley into
the bargain? A little questioning developed the fact that that was its
precise plan. The question of rental charges did not enter into the
situation. The Pennsylvania was not direct in its explanation; it did not
say, as it might honestly have said: "We built this big, expensive station
as a competitive move, and we do not purpose to share the fruits of our
enterprise with a competitor who did not share the great risk of the
undertaking." It merely said that there was not room in the station for
the fourteen daily trains of the Baltimore and Ohio and the eight of the
little Lehigh Valley. It was handling 175 of its own trains there, and
about 275 of the Long Island in addition, but it could not find room for
twenty-two other trains.
Here was railroad competition showing its most disagreeable side to the
public weal. The man who lived at Martinsburg, West Virginia, or
Cumberland, Maryland, or virtually any of the other non-competitive points
of the Baltimore and Ohio was to be penalized henceforth in the name of
competition. Having enjoyed great comfort and facility under the
non-competitive plan of the United States Railroad Administration in the
use of the Pennsylvania Station in the heart of Manhattan, he was now to
be shoved back into the old station at Communipaw, just below Jersey City,
with its slow and cumbersome ferry connections across the Hudson River. It
was not likely that he would henceforth become an enthusiast over the
competitive system of railroading.
The whole thing seemed so absurd that I took it upon myself to mention it
in the public prints. That apparently did the trick. Publicity ofttimes
does. The Pennsylvania changed its position; in a big and graceful and
generous way it waived what apparently were its obvious competitive rights
in the situation, and invited both the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh
Valley to remain at least for some years to come in its great New York
passenger terminal. The invitation was accepted with alacrity.
Most of the consolidated ticket-offices still remain, although there is a
constant disposition among the more independent of our separate railroads
to break away from them. Theoretically offering far better facilities to
the traveler than the separate city offices, practically they rarely do
this. For one thing, despite their brave show of mahogany and other fine
forms of office fittings, they frequently are under-manned, particularly
in seasons of heavy travel. And a man in a hurry going to one of them
frequently is compelled to wait an outrageously long time. The fact also
remains that the so-called weaker lines that use them seem so submerged as
hardly to have a fair chance at the competitive traffic. A small railroad
can make a large showing with an attractive office in the heart of a big
city. Relatively it outshadows its neighbor.
Where the individual roads have remained in the consolidated offices up to
the present time, it has been largely the result of a laudable desire to
stand by their fellows. The Railroad Administration forced some one line
in each large city to assume the rental of the consolidated offices. In
Chicago, for instance, the ten-year lease (at $65,000 a year) of the
consolidated ticket-office fell upon the broad shoulders of the
Burlington. With the exception of the Northwestern system, which showed a
particular antipathy to the late Railroad Administration, virtually all
the large roads have remained with the Burlington.
There is moreover an economy argument in the consolidated office that is
not without its appeal to the railroad executive. The only question in the
mind of his traffic expert is whether the economy argument is not
completely overcome by the additional business to be gained by a red-hot
competitive little separate office. Of course if all the lines coming into
any large city should maintain red-hot competitive little separate offices
the gain would be theoretical rather than real. There might be some
passenger traffic actually created by the brave showing of the separate
offices, but I think that it would be negligible.
The convenient universally interchangeable mileage-book that McAdoo
installed (with his name printed upon each third tiny coupon) has been
retained with all of its universal privileges, up to the present time at
least. But no longer with the name of McAdoo brightly displayed. It still
represents no saving to the purchaser over the price of individual
separate tickets, though offering a certain convenience in the checking of
through baggage, in making Pullman reservations and the like. Yet the
putting through of the Senate bill authorizing the Interstate Commerce
Commission to reduce its price bids fair at last to lead toward a
correction of this precise phase of the situation. Gradually a pretty
well-defined feeling is being developed that railroad passenger-fares in
the United States to-day are entirely too high. "Not more fares but more
riders" is a slogan which a young man who is developing traffic for street
railways is using, with telling results. His slogan is quite as applicable
to the steam railroads. They apparently have brought their passenger-rates
to a point where the riding, always a variable and uncertain quantity, no
longer is attracted to their trains. And this is an hour when the
motor-car is steadily gaining strength as a competitor of the railroad.
The flat abolition of the stop-over privilege which some enthusiastic
railroad traffic expert urged upon McAdoo is now being slowly worn down
again, at least to the point where most of the stop-over privileges that
were in existence in pre-war days have now been restored. The traffic
departments of our various railroads all the way across the land at last
are beginning to unbend. The traveler is beginning to regain his old-time
privileges.
We do progress.
CHAPTER V
THE PRESENT-DAY SITUATION
Yet our progress is by no means rapid; it easily may be described in the
one word "halting."
In the opening chapter of this book I directed attention to the ravages in
the service of our national railroad structure that any man can readily
find for himself. To discover, specifically, how the passenger train
service across much of the land has been depleted he has but to turn over
the pages of that ponderous tome, the "Official Guide of the Railways of
the United States." The many, many trains of yesterday that are missing
to-day even after the partial reparations to this important branch of the
railroad's social obligation to the nation that the Railroad
Administration made after the war crisis show the deletions that have been
made. There too he might find how the speed of most of the trains that
remain is slackened.
I have no argument to present for the excessively fast train in the United
States; it is a risk and an extravagance that we can well afford to do
without. One of the shrewdest moves that the New York Central and the
Pennsylvania systems made was, some seven or eight years ago, when they
lengthened the running time of their fastest New York-Chicago trains from
eighteen to twenty hours. There is little doubt that the New York Central,
at least, could operate a train between these two cities in sixteen hours
or in a very few minutes in excess of that time by the use of the long
straight tangents of its Michigan Central subsidiary across the southerly
portions of Ontario and Michigan. But at what strain upon the men back of
the enormously efficient machine, at what great risk to life and property!
Despite the proverbial reputation of the American for great haste in
everything, we have had but little desire in this country for extreme
high-speed trains such as our friends overseas take such keen delight in
boasting about. A few years ago the world was running riot on train speed.
We had our two rival eighteen-hour expresses between New York and Chicago,
to say nothing of the once famous Empire State doing the 440 miles between
New York and Buffalo in exactly eight hours. It was that train which a
short distance west of Rochester once reached the unofficial speed of
112-1/2 miles an hour, and held it for several minutes. There were a dozen
mile-a-minute expresses between Camden, opposite Philadelphia, and
Atlantic City, divided between the Pennsylvania and Reading systems. The
latter road, in connection with the Central Railroad of New Jersey, ran
fast expresses each hour of the day between Jersey City, Communipaw
Station, and the Market Street terminal in Philadelphia, a distance of
ninety miles, in an hour and fifty minutes. And the management of the New
Haven was purposing to establish a four-hour train between New York and
Boston--229 miles.
In those days our British cousins were maintaining our pace, or possibly
going it a little better. Competing roads on each side of Great Britain
all the way from London up to Aberdeen, its northernmost large city, were
at each other's throats. The London and Northwestern and the Caledonian
railways, working together, operated a train from London to Perth which on
the greater part of its run was scheduled for actual operation at 49-1/2
miles an hour and which was given but two hours and five minutes for the
117-3/4 miles between Carlisle and Stirling. Finally the competition
reached a point where these roads--the so-called "West Coast route"--had a
regularly scheduled train from London to Aberdeen, 540 miles, in eight
hours and thirty-two minutes. This was considerably better than the East
Coast route--chiefly the Great Northern, the Northeastern, and the North
British railways--ever succeeded in doing. Their best regular schedule,
even though their route was seventeen miles shorter, was eight hours and
forty-two minutes.
The best regular trains on the crack Chicago and Alton, the shortest route
between Chicago and St. Louis, take to-day seven hours and forty-five
minutes to traverse the 284 miles intervening between those two important
cities. It is 451 miles across level country from Chicago to Kansas City
by the double-tracked Santa Fe--a distance ninety miles less than by the
West Coast route from London to Aberdeen--yet the Santa Fe's best train
between Chicago to Kansas City takes eleven hours and twenty-five minutes
for the run. And even then it is not permitted to carry passengers; the
best passenger time is five or ten minutes longer. I do not think that we
Americans can be called speed crazy.
Great Britain also has now slowed her trains down. She progressed that way
before the beginning of the war. A nasty accident or two close to the
beginning of the century was responsible for the change; while the war
itself, as in this country, slowed the fast train schedules to a vast
extent. Now her service is back to its old general standard of reasonable
(but no longer excessive) high speeds in almost every direction out of
London. There are abundant service expresses running in an even four hours
between that city and both Manchester, 184 miles, and Liverpool, 193
miles. Competition is supposed to have forced this service. Competition is
forever supposed to be forcing service. Yet on the non-competitive Great
Western railway I rode, but a few months ago, from London to Bath, 104
miles, in an even two hours, while across the Channel, I had ridden, but a
few weeks before that, over the war-struck Eastern railway of France
ninety miles from Paris to Rheims in just sixty seconds less than an even
two hours.
We have slackened our running time appreciably in the United States these
days; very wisely, I think, in the case of the twenty-hour trains between
New York and Chicago. As a matter of fact the Twentieth Century Limited,
doing the 979 miles of the longer high-speed route between those two
cities, from 2:45 o'clock one afternoon (Eastern time) to 9:45 o'clock the
next morning (Central time), still makes a remarkable train performance.
The Pennsylvania still has two or three of the mile-a-minute flyers in
service between Camden and Atlantic City--59.7 miles in fifty-seven or
fifty-eight minutes. The Reading has one or two of its flyers left, not
only between those points, but between Philadelphia and Jersey City.
Yet this is about all of the mile-a-minute work. From here the slackening
in time is appreciable until we come to the comparatively slow
performances of the high-grades between Chicago and the cities that lie
back of it. The New Haven no longer talks about a four-hour train from New
York to Boston; it has lengthened its schedule between those cities. There
also has been a slight lengthening of the one-time high-speed schedules
between New York and Washington. There has been a let-down. The once proud
Empire State Express now takes nine hours instead of eight to go from New
York to Buffalo, while out upon the Pacific coast the tremendously
high-speed expresses of the Santa Fe between San Francisco and Los
Angeles, the Saint and the Angel, which we saw but a little time ago being
summarily dropped by the McAdoo administration, have never been restored.
They are not likely to be restored.
The Southern Pacific takes thirteen hours and one-half for its best
express between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a run of 475 miles. But a
moment ago we saw the West Coast system of England doing 540 miles in
eight hours and thirty-two minutes, and keeping it up month in and month
out. Similarly the S. P. takes twenty-nine hours and ten minutes for its
best train between Portland and San Francisco, a distance of 773 miles. It
is 517 miles from Paris to Marseilles; the best regular express train
between those two cities makes the run in twelve hours and thirty-three
minutes. It is 652 miles from Paris to Nice; a regularly scheduled
passenger train does it to-day in seventeen hours. And yet the French
railway executives promise that they will do much better.
In these things we are not progressing. Take once again the worst of our
national transport picture, the vexed New England situation. I have just
referred to the slight lengthening of the time of the fast trains between
New York and Boston, rather than any expected possible shortening of their
schedules. The New York-Boston services of both the New Haven and the
Boston and Albany roads are not typical, however, of the service that is
being given New England these days; if it were there would be no large
cause for complaint. It represents in fact the very top notch of the
passenger service of the six most congested States in the Union, the very
States which by all right and sense should to-day be enjoying the best
passenger service, not the worst.
We have seen already the deplorable state into which the suburban service
in and out of Boston has long since fallen. Boston is not all of New
England, even though some Bostonians may so believe. Take the case of the
Fitchburg. The Fitchburg started off as a railroad with good prospects.
For it was bored the spectacular Hoosac tunnel (4-3/4 miles in length),
upon the completion of which the Fitchburg became the short-line between
Boston and both Troy and Albany. The lordly Boston and Albany meanders
magnificently through the high hills of the Berkshires, and takes much
longer for the process.
Unfortunately the little Fitchburg road never had much of a chance for its
money. The close traffic alliances between the Boston and Albany and the
New York Central, which preceded the actual leasing of the one road by the
other, gave it little or no chance for through freight between New England
and the West. Its short mileage and well-built line availed it nothing.
Eventually it fell into the hand of the Boston and Maine and became, in
large part at least, a local line, taking from the New York Central and
the Delaware and Hudson such freight as the Boston and Albany would not
or could not take. Yet for years it kept up a brave show. It ran between
Boston and Buffalo and Chicago and Detroit and St. Louis sleeping-cars
a-plenty. It had an excellent dining-car service too.
The dining-cars are gone from the Fitchburg these days. It has become
indeed a very secondary stem of the Boston and Maine. Two parlor-cars ply
their way daily on slow trains between Boston and Troy; recently a
Boston-Buffalo sleeper was added to the service. The road has lost not
only its name but its personality and its service too.
What is true of the Fitchburg is equally true of the erstwhile Housatonic.
Equally true also is the fact that twenty-five years ago the best train
between Pittsfield and New York made the run in an hour's time less than
the best train on that line consumes to-day. There were more trains too,
just as there were more trains then on the New Haven and Northampton line,
the Connecticut River, the New England, the Boston and Providence, and a
dozen other little individual roads that long since lost their name, their
prestige, their individuality, and, what is far more important, their
intimate personal touch with their patrons and their employees.
The main line express trains of the New Haven between Boston and New York,
either by the way of Springfield or by Providence, have not lost their
excellence to-day, neither have the main line express trains of the Boston
and Albany nor the Boston and Maine's trains to Portland and points far
beyond, although there are none too many of them and they are none too
generous in their accommodations. It is in the branch line trains, just as
in the branch line stations, that the New England passenger service has
not progressed but has distinctly retrograded.
Descend beneath the obvious. Ignore even the sickening decline in railroad
dividends, whether average or cumulative--the records of Wall Street will
give you all that you want of these--and come to the deterioration of the
roads as shown in hard and unsentimental figures. The condition of the
locomotives and cars of almost all of our railroads had begun to decline
seriously even before the days of the Railroad Administration. When that
supreme governmental organization came into being it pledged itself to
return to the carriers their properties at least as well and as fully
equipped as upon the day it took them over. It did not quite succeed in
doing this. The extent to which it failed, by the statistics referring to
freight-cars alone, was as follows: In 1917, the year of private railroad
operation immediately preceding those of government control, our national
transport structure had 2,479,472 freight-cars, which was much less than
it should have had. The roads had failed to build enough equipment to keep
pace with the overwhelming increase of traffic, which almost at the very
beginning of the World War had been thrust upon them. Under almost all
circumstances they found it necessary to "scrap" or otherwise remove from
service approximately 100,000 worn-out cars each year. For several years
before 1914 their construction of new cars had barely more than kept pace
with this annual loss.
Yet under governmental operation things went from bad to worse; despite
its orders for 100,000 box-cars the Railroad Administration did not buy
enough cars to keep pace with those that were being scrapped. In 1918 the
total freight-car equipment of our carriers had declined to 2,397,943, in
1919 to 2,361,102, in 1920 to 2,352,911--in other words a total decline
since 1917 of 125,561--while the normal increase of our transport plant
called for an increase of at least twice this number of cars and certainly
admitted no decrease whatever.
In this connection, I think that it is at least worth a paragraph in
passing to notice that in the seven years ending with 1913 our railroads
increased their freight traffic 39 per cent. In those same years they
added 315,000 freight-cars and 8,100 freight locomotives to their existing
equipment. In the seven years that ended with 1920 the traffic increased
again--virtually in the same ratio, 38 per cent.--but only 143,000
freight-cars and 4200 freight-locomotives were added to the total
rolling-stock. In 1921 but 20,000 new freight-cars were purchased and but
250 locomotives of all types. It is no wonder that many of our railroaders
now view with real apprehension any return of heavy traffic.
Moreover not only the number but the condition of the individual cars has
declined. A small Eastern city which I know very well indeed is a brisk
point in interchange freight. It is also a water port of fair importance,
to which a large number of coal-cars come in the average summer and
autumn. Last autumn I noticed that many of these cars were in a pathetic
state of disrepair. The yardmaster explained it to me.
"The first time they come through from the mines," he said, "they will
have their hoppers braced with a bit of timber so as to keep all the coal
from spilling out upon the tracks before they even reach here. Somehow
that timber will get lost before the car gets back to the mines again. The
mine-bosses will put in a flooring this time. Fine business, that! The
hoppers won't work at all then, and thirty tons of coal have to be
shoveled out by hand--at the present price of labor!"
Think of this single all-too-typical instance many times multiplied;
combine this fact with that of the great decrease of freight-cars of any
sort upon our rails to-day and you begin to get the measure of the true
condition of our sick man of American business. To-day approximately
354,000 of the freight-cars of the United States are reported as being in
bad order. And while a "bad-order" car may be, and frequently is, used for
some forms of rail traffic (as for instance a leaky grain-car utilized for
the shipment of automobiles) the fact remains that nearly 15 per cent. of
our total freight-car equipment stands in great need of large repairs or
of replacement, while 19 per cent. of our locomotives are so far gone that
they have been thrust upon the sidings virtually abandoned. In another
chapter we shall see how these locomotives might be rejuvenated and put to
work again, more efficient than ever before. For this one however
consider them nil and valueless to the American railroad.
It was partly to remedy conditions such as these as well as to provide for
the return of the roads to private operation that the Transportation Act
was passed. For there is not only a great rolling-stock shortage but
virtually little or no extension of our railroad structure. As recently as
in the decade from 1901 to 1911, 52,000 miles of brand-new line--a larger
route mileage than that of almost any other nation in the world--were laid
down. Since 1911 there have been virtually no new railroads in the United
States. The comparatively small San Diego and Arizona railroad was
completed but a year ago, but this was more than offset by the abandonment
and removal of such lines as the Buffalo and Susquehanna and the Colorado
Midland, to take two instances out of several. In 1920 only 314 miles of
new railroad line were built in the United States, while 536 miles were
abandoned. In 1921 service was discontinued on 1626 more miles of
railroad. For six years past our total rail mileage has been going
backwards, not rapidly but steadily and perceptibly; the small amount
being constructed each year is being rapidly overbalanced by that which is
being torn up. Our sick man of American business is a very sick man
indeed.
Up to a decade ago our railroads were still busy increasing and enlarging
their terminals, double-tracking their single-track lines, and
three-tracking and four-tracking their double-track ones. The Union
Pacific was achieving the distinction of being the first long-distance
double-track line in the great West; in the East the Erie, the Lackawanna,
and the Baltimore and Ohio were completing their remarkable series of
cut-offs. All this has ceased, even though the necessity for its
continuation has not ceased. For if the country does not absolutely stand
in need of new trunk-lines to-day there still is a vast and unanswered
demand for feeder branches in many, many corners of it, for duplication of
tracks upon existing and badly overcrowded single-track and double-track
lines. New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburg--other
important cities as well--fairly cry aloud for a revision and extension of
their terminal facilities, and cry in vain.
* * * * *
Rates have been increased, comparatively recently, to a point, as we have
seen, not only higher than the most imaginative of our rail traffic
experts might have dreamed five years ago but, as I have remarked already,
to one where the traffic instead of being attracted to our carriers is
actually being driven away from them; and some of the wiser executives
have come to the point of asking the Interstate Commerce Commission for a
modification of rates. From a niggardly policy of former years toward the
railroads in regard to rates, this body, in professed obedience to the
Transportation Act, raised them to the prohibitive point. Now it is
beginning to see the error of its ways and, as we have seen at the behest
of actual railroaders, is lowering certain of the freight charges,
although not in any general or particularly scientific fashion. Recently
the commission responded to a large public pressure by permitting the
roads to reduce their freight rates on farm products 10 per cent. for a
test period of six months, with the possibility that further freight rate
reductions will be made.
And finally, as we all know, wages are now being reduced. Already they
have been brought down half a billion dollars a year, and in all
likelihood they will be even further lowered. As to the justice or wisdom
of all this we shall talk presently. The fact remains here and now that a
generous step has been taken in bringing down the greatest single item of
the cost of conducting railroad transportation, while some of the other
costs, chiefly materials, to-day are being reduced automatically by the
steady fall in market quotations of supplies of every sort. The situation
slowly but surely is working itself through.
* * * * *
On the other hand, what does the public demand in this railroad situation?
What is the opinion of the Man on the Station Platform? Surely he has a
voice in the matter. He rides on the train, if not daily as a commuter,
then perhaps as often as every week or every fortnight. He talks. He
observes. He forms conclusions. And some of these last might be accepted
as fairly indicative of his needs as a constant patron of the railroad in
both its freight and its passenger services.
The Man on the Station Platform believes first and foremost that
transportation in this country, as well as in all others, is not merely
railroads or motor-trucks or canal barges--not even aeroplanes, if you
please--but a scientific correlation of all of these agents of transport.
He believes that each must have its own field in which it reigns supreme
because in that field it is the cheapest and the most efficient form of
transport. And therefore in that field should be recognized as supreme and
so developed.
I share these beliefs of my friend who stands on the shady platform
awaiting his up-local. I cannot see these agencies in the long run and in
the fullest understanding as competitors but as correlators, if such a
word may safely be coined. Each should supplement the other. In the full
understanding of modern business competition has little real value; in the
conduct of public utilities it has none whatsoever. We learned long ago
that in gas-works or in water-works, in telephone service, even in the
traction facilities of our largest metropolitan cities, it was no lasting
help in the long run but merely an added expense burden upon the
community, and so should be eliminated or at least brought down to its
lowest possible level.
Here then is perhaps the greatest of the burdens that the man outside of
the railroad can wish to see removed from it. There are others: the
neglect of the fine intensive salesmanship of transportation, which should
have been brought to the fore years and years ago; the opportunity for the
development of electric traction, of the container system of handling
goods, which oddly enough brings us back again to the correlation of the
several agents of American transport and the elimination of our absurd
competitive plan.
All of these things will have had our attention before I am done. The
question is one that demands a great deal of attention. The condition of
our rails, instead of growing stronger each day, daily grows more
precarious. It is obvious that this condition cannot long continue--the
service greatly reduced and impaired, the men sullen and ofttimes working
at direct cross-purposes to the management, the rates raised to the point
where traffic begins to refuse to come to the stations, the financial
condition so depressed that railroad securities will not sell under the
absurdly uneconomic prevailing conditions, no thought whatsoever being
given to the morrow.
Out of this miserable mass we must raise a program, definite and distinct
and statesmanlike, as sound as the program under which we changed our
money situation from periodic chaos to vast and proved stability. It must
be a program of progress, not a continuation of the absurd artifice of
competition years after every other business has found that its economic
strength comes in correlation and not in competition, but a genuine
progress--progress in the physical fiber of our railroad structure, using
the electric motor, the gasolene motor, the industrial terminal, the
package container, a dozen other steps as well; progress in the really
fine science of selling transportation; progress in human relationship. In
such progress there is nothing chimerical, nothing even remotely
approaching the fantastic. And in such progress, and nowhere else, can one
hope to find a solution of our railroad problem of to-day that even
approaches permanency.
CHAPTER VI
THE MAN FACTOR OF THE PROBLEM
Progress in human relationship may be, I think, safely permitted at least
the consideration of priority in any understanding of our surpassing
railroad problem. For it may also be set down as fairly axiomatic that
unless we progress in this phase of transport we cannot expect to go ahead
in any other department of it. In its tense importance to the larger
question this very human problem can be regarded as foundation-like. Upon
it the railroad structure may yet build. Without it, it certainly must
fall.
For more than two decades past, imagination, virility, foresight have been
upon the wane in our railroads of the United States until to-day with
these qualities quite gone upon many of them, the debacle of our national
transport machine becomes a doubly depressing picture. The man with an
idea may be needed upon our carriers but, as we shall see gradually, he is
not often wanted there. They are ruled by conservatism; conservatism
carried to the last degree. Yet only yesterday the man with an idea was at
a premium in our railroading; our roads themselves were known for their
daring, their strength, their progress. To-day too many of the men who
operate them are the abject slaves of a system; the only ideas that they
safely may advance are those leading to immediate economies. Immediate
expenses, even with great and far-reaching economies as their ultimate
result, are quite taboo. The railroader no longer may think. Apparently he
may only execute.
What is the reason for this--for the human debacle of our carriers
following so closely upon the physical, and in many cases responsible for
it? Has the American railroader lost his ability to think and to act upon
original lines? Has he sunk, with the debris of much of his once proud
transport system, almost to the limits of degradation?
A hundred answers will be made to these questions. Some of them will come
from banking interests--shrewd men, in banking. These will bear upon the
degree of regulation to which our rail carriers are subjected to-day.
"These government sharks have killed railroad initiative," it will be said
time and time again. There is some truth in that answer, yet I think
myself there is greater truth in the statement that absentee ownership of
the carriers--if I may be permitted to speak frankly, long-distance banker
control--has done far more than regulation, either State or Federal, to
kill initiative and progress in our transport machine. Wall Street is
likely to think too exclusively in terms of dividends; Wall Street does
not think enough in terms of men.
People in Wall Street, and a good many others outside of that famous
thoroughfare as well, think of the difficulties of our railroad problem as
things merely of dollars and cents. They feel that the questions of rates
and wages, of income and outgo, are the sole factors to decide the future
weal or woe of the railroads. If the rates are put high enough and the
wages and other items of expenditure are kept low enough the roads will
prosper again. These people feel that the problem is solely an economic
one.
I believe that they are wrong. Granted that dollars and cents _do_ enter
largely into the problem and its solution, that unless our national system
of railroads becomes a real "going concern" it can hope for no continued
success, I still feel that the prime point of the entire question is
contained in three words, the human factor. This factor comes first, not
last. That Wall Street and other cocksure people have in the past placed
it behind the problem of finance, is one of the very large reasons why our
American railroads are having such extremely hard sledding at the present
moment.
The human problem of the railroad may be fairly said to be divided into
two classes, that of the patron and that of the employee. Before I am done
the necessities of the first of these classes will have had attention; for
the moment those of the second claim our full interest. There is always
that meaningful phrase, "the fine tradition of our American railroading,"
that we are using again and again because it stands for something very
definite, the thing which was largely responsible for the first upgrowth
and strength of our railroads and whose loss within recent years has been
chiefly responsible for their downfall. It was that tradition, that
old-fashioned affection for railroading and loyalty to it, that made men
work, not eight hours, but ten or twelve at a single stretch, and under
the stress of a great emergency, such as a flood or a blizzard, sometimes
sixteen or twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at a stretch. To-day they
will not do this.
Why?
It is not a story quickly told. To understand why the railroader of to-day
will not work long hours, even in reasonable emergencies, save under the
spur of fearfully high overtime pay, why he goes about with indifference
in his manner and a lurking grudge in his heart, one must dive beneath the
surface of the situation. There he may find the solution of the loss of
our railroad tradition.
The beginnings of that tradition are in the beginnings of the American
railroad itself. They root back to the days when the overland carriers
were in that same flash stage of development that in our day we have seen
come to the motor-car and the motor-truck--the days when romance rode the
steel highway, when it was thrusting its stout tendrils here and there and
everywhere, when earnings and enterprise and initiative were all alike
unlimited, when, in a word, the railroad called in an all but irresistible
way to the rich man's son and the poor man's too, when the banker's clerk
a president would be and the farmer's boy had as his supreme ambition the
driving of a fast passenger-locomotive.
What has become of that farmer's boy who used to stand in a field for a
single idle moment to watch the fast express go sweeping by and dream
wistfully of future possibilities, or who stood for a fascinated minute
beside the iron horse as it paused at the country depot, studying the
intricacies of thrust and gear and bearing? Alas, he no longer covets
railroading. It has ceased to enthrall or even interest him, despite the
fact that the swing of the pendulum is to-day all in favor of the rank and
file of men who work with their hands upon the railroad. Yesterday, in
those same golden days of which I have just spoken, the swing was at the
other end of the arc. The railroad employee was down; his employer was up.
Two years ago this giant pendulum had completed its course. The employer
was down, the employee up; and something approaching a social revolution
in our railroading had been accomplished.
The railroad employee--succinctly the two million and a half of the rank
and file of railroad workers--had become a political asset. Two million
and a half direct votes are a bait that few shrewd politicians can ignore.
That it was not ignored has in recent years been shown repeatedly, in the
passage, by this State legislature and that, of various protective
statutes for the railroaders, some of them good and some of them absurd;
in the thrusting through Congress of the Adamson Eight-Hour Law; and in
the extreme deference shown by the first Federal director-general of
railroads to the big brotherhoods and other unions of transport employees,
with the final result that those groups of railroad labor which had
remained unorganized up to the period of Federal control proceeded to
organize themselves. The stake was too good.
Incidentally it may be stated that in past years the average railroad
executive was himself the largest single force toward the propagation of
trade-unionism within his industry. While decrying its steady growth he
placed a premium upon its advantages. Let me explain. A few years ago, say
ten or fifteen, at the most, there were but four important unions of
railroad employees--the four great brotherhoods of train workers:
engineers, firemen, conductors, and trainmen. These were and still are
high-grade organizations, extremely independent, refusing for many years
even to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. The men who
conducted them were high-grade men of great principle and considerable
vision. They fought for the rights of their fellows and fought well, with
the result that there were few times when train employees were not
adequately paid.
At that time the rest of railroad labor, with the very few exceptions, had
no national organization; its individual loyalty was given instead to the
properties for which it worked. With what result? Here is one glowing
instance.
Conductors, then and now, belonged almost without exception to their
strong trade organization, the Brotherhood of Railroad Conductors. It took
good care of its own. A conductor on a fairly good run might easily earn
from $175 to $200 a month, even in those prosaic days of butter at
twenty-five cents a pound. It was a good pay, yet one could hardly say
that the average conductor was overpaid. For he was far more than a mere
train employee, particularly if he had a passenger run. He was a great
point of personal contact between a railroad and its patrons. Upon his
tact and diplomacy and understanding, or lack of these qualities, his road
might rise or fall. True at all times, this was intensified in hotly
competitive territory. A good conductor might easily bring or hold patrons
for his road, a poor one drive them away to the other line.
Yet I think you will agree with me that at least an equal point of contact
between the railroad and its patron is the man with whom he comes in
contact before he boards the train--the station-agent. _His_ tact and
diplomacy and understanding have a good deal to do with attracting
patronage to the road. Yet it was not more than a decade ago that I found
in a certain small brisk Eastern city of some twenty-five thousand people
the chief representative of an important railroad working seven days a
week, twelve or fourteen hours a day, and paid $85 a month. He knew what
the conductors who ran the trains past his station were receiving and it
rankled.
This was not an unusual case, this high-grade man, working long hours in
his office at the passenger station and between trains scurrying out
through the town to sell tickets to possible travelers over his line--it
was in a genuinely competitive territory. It was all too typical. More
than one railroad in past years paid its dividends out of the exploitation
of its labor, and to-day is reaping the benefit of its short-sightedness.
One can imagine the ease with which the former United States Railroad
Administration was able to help bring about a strong union organization of
railroad station-agents and employees!
Mr. McAdoo was not asleep to the possibilities of this situation. We
already have seen how from the outset he extended to labor a place in his
cabinet and placed the entire vexed wage situation in the hands of a
special commission headed by the late Franklin K. Lane. Now in all
fairness and in simple justice to the Railroad Administration it should be
set down that no matter what its motive it did seek to place railroad
labor on a more scientific and more human basis with relation to its
employer than any private corporation had ever succeeded in giving it. It
tried to place the railroad wage on a basis more directly in accord with
living costs, and less with mere supply and demand. Similarly it
endeavored to better the working conditions of the rank and file of the
railroaders. That in some of these last cases, particularly those of
certain of the so-called national agreements, eventually it went entirely
too far, is not to be denied. That is now proved by the willingness of the
new Federal tribunal, the Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago, to abrogate
these agreements as soon as the individual carriers shall have succeeded
in making new ones with their workers.
This last, however, seems to be much easier planned than actually
accomplished. Months are slipping by and some of the outrageous and
expensive agreements still stand, along with some others which are
neither outrageous nor expensive. The very worst of the lot, the
meticulous arrangements under which a small job on a locomotive headlight
(to make a single possible but rather typical instance) required six or
eight men because each was a specialist and no man could infringe upon
another's specialty, are going now and going rather rapidly. There is an
apocryphal story around one Eastern railroad town to the effect that the
changing of an air-hose connection on a Pullman sleeping-car one day more
than a year ago cost the railroad forty dollars--a small job which two
ordinary capable mechanics would have been glad to perform for but two or
three at the most. Instances such as these have been multiplied. A
farmer's boy who lived close to a railroad in the Middle West and who
received five dollars a month and an occasional trip-pass to Chicago and
back for oiling and watching an automatic electric pump at an obscure
siding saw himself rated as an electrician and in receipt of $185 a month
(standardized wage) without having lifted one finger toward the bonanza.
It was heyday for the rank and file. The Lane Commission, which really did
much scientific work on this wage question despite the exceedingly great
time pressure and the war crisis under which it worked, started the ball
rolling, yet in what seemingly was a very fair and reasonable fashion. It
was after that, even after Mr. McAdoo's actual term of office as
director-general, that the real damage was done. The pendulum swung then,
and swung far. From a point where the wage-scale was unfair to the
railroad employee it came toward a point where it was unfair to the
railroad investor.
This was particularly true in the case of the shop-craft men. They seem to
have been the real offenders in the situation. With the position of the
men in the train service, the members of the brotherhoods, I can have
little else than great sympathy. Their plight at this moment is
deplorable. At the best, they catch the hard end of railroading, the long,
unconscionable hours, the stress of bad weather, the nights away from
home, all the other difficult conditions of life upon the road. I do not
believe that there have been many times when these men have been seriously
overpaid. The score is far more apt to lie upon the other side of the
table.
True it is that even in these branches of railroad service the unreasoning
form of national agreement has crept in. I can remember not so many years
ago up in northern New York when if a switch-crew was sent down to one of
the paper-mills to get a box-car it was paid two hours' pay for two hours'
work. That was fair pay--and it was not. A switch-crew even in dull times
could hardly exist on the prospect of getting no more than two hours' pay
out of twenty-four. Gradually the pay for such a job--any job at all--was
set at a minimum of half a day. That seemed fair. A little later this
minimum, no matter how small the job, was set at a full day's pay. Even
that might have been fair were it never abused. Let me illustrate.
Here is a yard-crew kicking around in Watertown yard. The first thing that
happens in a brisk day is that an engine derails somewhere south of the
junction. It is not a serious mishap, and the yard-crew, acting as a
wrecker, cleans it up in ninety minutes or thereabouts and gets a full
day's pay. An hour later that same crew has to take a box-car two miles
down the Cape Branch to a paper-mill, another ninety minutes perhaps, and
another full day's pay for every man Jack of the crew. They sit around for
three hours in the yardmaster's cabin and settle all the affairs of the
New York Central railroad. In two or three more hours a careless switcher
sends two flat-cars off the end of the siding up at Sewall's Island. Our
little crew is again a wrecker. It goes up to the Island, puts the
derailed cars on the track again,--another ninety minutes of actual
work,--and draws a third full day's pay. Three days' pay in eight or nine
hours is not bad. I should like to be able myself to turn the trick.
This is an exceptional case, of course--and it is not. Some strange things
are possible in the national agreements which were foisted upon the
Railroad Administration during the control of Walker D. Hines. I do not
believe that Hines himself ever realized how strange they might
become--his own large railroad experience would have guarded him against
them.
* * * * *
When the versatile Henry Ford embarked not so many months ago on the
difficult and time-honored business of running a railroad he was not
greeted with any warm-hearted reception dinner by the American Railway
Association. He probably was not even asked to join the association. Its
members had heard of Mr. Ford as a shatterer of traditions. And
traditions, as you already know, to the heart of the old-time railroader
are like unto the ten commandments themselves. I have no brief for Mr.
Ford, any more than for Mr. McAdoo. He is not an economist, although he
would like to think himself one. He is a mechanic, a super-mechanic if you
please. And he has a glorious knowledge of men, their strength and their
weaknesses. Yet this is not criticism. These last qualities are much
needed in our American railroad situation to-day. By this time there is
almost a superfluity of economists in it.
Mr. Ford at the outset sought to solve the railroad labor question by
straddling it--by tearing up all the cumbersome and complicated
standardized national agreements between the men of the small railroad
that he now owns and substituting for them a generous minimum wage and the
right of the road to utilize a man at whatever work it pleases, within his
established eight hours of labor. On Mr. Ford's railroad an employee may
possibly drive a locomotive for ninety minutes and then spend five hours
and a half washing car windows, or trucking cases upon a freight-house
platform. And the astonishing thing is that in this one instance at least
the plan apparently is working.
It may be that Mr. Ford has reached the solution of the problem. I am not
at all sure that he has not. But I feel that if he has, a large number of
railroad executives and sub-executives will forget their annoyances at
the Detroit gentleman's publicity methods in connection with his personal
railroad and begin to call him blessed. They have had little good fortune
as yet in handling the standardized national agreements with their men,
which were their unwilling inheritance from Uncle Sam, railroader sublime.
The agreements still stand despite the professed entire willingness of the
Railroad Labor Board to abrogate them, for the simple reason that no
acceptable substitute for them has yet been brought forward. The Labor
Board has made some rather sweeping rulings in cutting down overtime
payments and the like, however--all to the cost of the rank and file of
the railroaders. Their position steadily becomes less and less enviable.
In October last they took the 12 per cent. cut in their wages--roughly
speaking, half a billion dollars. They did not want to take that; the
hot-heads in the organization talked "strike" and a national tie-up of our
rail transport machine. If it could have been achieved it would have been
a real national calamity. As it was, the country had a very bad state of
nerves over the mere possibility of the thing. The strike was an
impossibility. Many of the railroad executives in their hearts wanted it.
With labor conditions as they were across the country, with the
unwillingness (to put it mildly) of the average man to have his comfort
and necessities interfered with no matter how much right or justice might
be involved in the situation, the executives held all the cards. The
leaders of the men knew that. Therefore there was no strike. Strikes are
rarely popular when times are dull.
Perhaps it is knowing this that a certain group of railroad
executives--there is no great unanimity in the matter--is steadily
pressing toward a further wage reduction of another 10 per cent. I shall
refrain from comment upon the wisdom or unwisdom of such a further step at
this time. That the very executives who are urging it are, I think, none
too sure of their position is indicated by the fact that they are coupling
the proposed reduction with vague suggestions that if it is granted they
will reduce their freight-rates, at least, correspondingly. The idea of
reducing rates to build up traffic apparently does not even come into the
reckoning.
* * * * *
Would you understand this situation better? Then come back with me for a
moment to those humming summer days of 1920 when the railroads of the
United States were still in record-breaking traffic. It is June, 1920; a
sluggish hot evening in the city of Chicago. Eight railroad engineers,
members in good standing of their brotherhood, are set upon by a gang of
organized thugs--in the picturesque phraseology of the railroaders, a
"wrecking crew"--in the shadows of the great Northwestern Terminal, and so
badly beaten up that they have to be sent to the nearest hospitals for
treatment. Yet the Chicago newspapers of the very next morning announced
with a sort of smug optimism that "satisfactory progress" was being made
with the switchmen's strike. They predicted an early break-up of the
entire "outlaw" walk-out (which had been in progress since the preceding
April), and apparently without a definite knowledge that each ensuing
twenty-four hours were seeing the whole outrageous business gain in its
vicious strength.
Up to that time we had had almost every thing difficult and disagreeable
in our railroad debacle except physical violence. It then seemed to have
embarked upon this final phase of badly disordered industrialism. The
Chicago imbroglio was not particularly exceptional. Brotherhood men all
over the country, members of the most powerful unions that this land has
ever known, literally went to their work nightly in fear and in trembling.
In few of our big cities is police protection to-day at its highest point
of efficiency--for a variety of reasons, which need no particular
explanation here and now. This means, in turn, that rowdyism and thugism
are at high-water marks. When these are organized by brains and financed
with plenty of real money they seem to go all unchecked. And loyal
railroaders of every sort suffer the penalty, in the first instance at
least, with the dear old public as usual in the role of the greatest
sufferer and the final judge.
Outrageous as it really was, the outlaw strike was one of the most human
that this country has ever seen. It came as the logical result of official
stupidity and procrastination. In January, 1919, the various groups of
railroad employees, appalled, as was every other form of worker, by not
only the steady but the extremely rapid increase in living costs, made
applications for wage raises beyond those that the labor commission
originally had granted--the so-called billion-dollar increase. So did
other forms of labor ask for wage raises--and got them. The applications
of the railroad workers remained under consideration after eighteen
months. The Railroad Administration, even though it continued in full
control of our carriers for fourteen months after the wage applications
had been filed, passed the buck--and permitted the national agreements.
That was politics. The recently created Railroad Labor Board sitting out
at Chicago was going over all the testimony again, making solemn and
voluminous proceedings of a business that might be decided, tentatively at
least, in a week of real work. That was politics again.
In the meantime, in those slowly moving eighteen months, what came to
pass? In San Francisco, in Portland, in Seattle, in half a dozen other
west coast cities where the wages of unskilled labor had
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