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.