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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 coöperative 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. Coöperation, 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 coöperation. 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 coöperate well he showed himself possessed of a genius for organization as well as for coördination. 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 Fé. 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 Fé. 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 Fé, had begun to acquire his remarkable knowledge of railroad conditions in virtually every section of the land.

The Santa Fé 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.