Our Railroads To-Morrow

by Edward Hungerford

“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.