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