CHAPTER II
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.