Organization as a science seeks to develop and to support the strong qualities of human nature. Organization likewise takes account of and seeks to minimize the amiable failings of human nature. Constitutional liberty insures the citizen protection against the caprice of the public officer. Administrative liberty demands an analogous measure of protection for the subordinate from the whim of his corporate superior. An amiable failing of many a railway president is to be satisfied with having everybody under his own authority, and to forget that the official next below may be embarrassed by having only a partial control. The general manager who insists the hardest that his superintendents are best off under his departmental system will squirm the quickest under the acid test of having the chief supply, the chief maintenance or the chief mechanical official report to the president. The superintendent who finds himself with a complete divisional organization is oblivious to the troubles of a distant yardmaster with car inspectors. When your old Dad was a ninety-dollar yardmaster some of his most important work was at the mercy of a forty-five dollar car inspector. The latter was under a master mechanic a hundred miles or more away, who in turn could usually and properly count on the support of the superintendent of motive power. The obvious inference was to relieve the yardmaster of responsibility for mechanical matters. From one viewpoint these mechanical questions are too highly technical for the yardmaster. From another they are matters of common sense requiring more good judgment than technical training. No, I would not put every yardmaster over the roundhouse foreman and the car inspectors. What I would do would be to make the position of yardmaster sufficiently attractive to impose as a prerequisite for appointment a knowledge of mechanical as well as transportation matters. Gradually I would work away from the switchman or trainman specialist to the all-'round man in whom I could concentrate authority as the head of an important sub-unit of organization. Instead of leveling downward, as the labor unions do, by assuming that the average man can learn only one branch of operation, I would recognize individuality and gradually develop a higher composite type. Because some car inspectors are not fitted to become yardmasters is no good reason for practically excluding all car inspectors from honorable competition for such advancement. When we build a department wall to keep the other fellow out we sometimes find it has kept us in. We blame the labor unions for these narrowing restrictions of employment and advancement. Look once more for the source, and you will find it among our predecessors in the official class, a generation or more ago. These officials insisted upon planes of department cleavage which the men below were quick to recognize. Railway manhood has been more dwarfed by exaggerated official idea of specialization with resulting departmental jealousies than by the labor unions.
Therefore, my boy, let us get some of these inconsistencies out of our own optics before we talk too much about the dust that seems to blind the eyes of those who are exposed to the breezes of that world famous thoroughfare which faces old Trinity Church in New York.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER III.
THE GENERAL MANAGER ON THE WITNESS STAND.
Chicago, April 22, 1911.
My Dear Boy:—Did it ever occur to you how easily a bright lawyer could tangle up many an able railway official on the witness stand? Nowadays we have to spend more or less valuable time testifying about service, rates, capitalization, valuation, practices, methods, and a score of other things that become of public interest. Whether this is just or unjust, necessary or unnecessary, is beside the question. It is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us. The wise railway man, therefore, so orders his official life that it may endure the scrutiny of both the persecutor and the prosecutor, of both the inquisitor and the investigator, of both the muckraker and the political economist. It sometimes happens, since men are only boys grown tall, that public hearings are accompanied by stage settings for dramatic effect; that trifling inconsistencies are magnified into egregious errors. Let me picture part of such a hearing with a general manager on the stand:
Question: You testified, Mr. General Manager, on the direct examination that your road is well managed and has a highly efficient organization, did you not?
Answer: Yes, sir, we think we have one of the best in the country.
Q. Would you mind telling the able members of this Honorable Commission in just what your superiority consists?