But Von Moltke picked up the idea, and incorporated it in the intensely modern army of modern Germany. It helped to win the great Franco-Prussian War, and when the other nations of Europe began to examine it it had a name; it was beginning to be a tangible something. Military men called it the “staff idea,” and when you asked them to explain it they told you that officers who handled men were known as “line officers,” and those who handled things as “staff officers.” In other words, men could be lifted—as it were, in an aëroplane of scientific organization—away from their commands and their narrow environments, up to a point where they could have perspective, where they could handle men, regiments, small arms, heavy ordnance on a large scale. The staff officers work in things in the abstract, just as the line officers mould men in the concrete.
There then is the rough theory of staff organization which was picked up and adapted to its use by the United States army at about the time of the Spanish-American War. Of its value there can be no doubt; of its efficiency no question.
A young man—Major Charles Hine—who had seen the operation of modern staff in the regular army, decided that it was a good thing for the great railroad systems of the country. Hine knew railroads. In order that he might know them thoroughly, he one day packed his uniforms and his saddle away in his trunk and went quietly out and got a job as brakeman on a freight train. He did not stay on the car roofs very long; he has served in about every conceivable post in railroad divisional organization, and he has had a good chance to study the weaknesses of those very organizations.
“We have got to eliminate government by chief clerks,” said Major Hine at the very beginning. “We are growing too rapidly for the men higher up. We are forced to delegate official authority to clerks and foremen, and then we build up an autocracy around some person of official rank. It is pernicious feudalism, this permitting the chief clerk, and a good many times some other clerks, to sign the name of the officer whom they attempt to represent.”
A railroad is really so spread out that its officers live a double official life; a part of the time they are at their desks, and another part out upon the line. Yet the average railroad officer, be he of high or low degree, flatters himself that by some subtle method of personal superiority, he is enabled to act intelligently in two places at the same time.
Major Hine saw how that worked at the very beginning of a special service with the Southern Pacific Railroad. He was down in the Yaqui River country in Mexico, where heavy construction work was under way. In company with the division engineer, he was riding the line mule-back. The division engineer had several parties under him, each in charge of a resident engineer, and all engaged in laying out and checking the contractor’s work. The headquarters of the division engineer were presided over by a ninety-dollar-a-month chief clerk, who was dealing in the absence of his superior with one hundred and twenty-five dollar resident engineers. The division engineer assured his guest that the telephone permitted close personal contact with headquarters, that every hour questions were referred to him. The vice-president of the company, desiring to change the assembling point for luncheon, sought for two hours from engineering headquarters to locate the division engineer, who was on the grade all the time.
The condition mentioned necessitates the chief clerk’s signing the name of his superior to heads of departments lower down, which heads are receiving lower salaries, and are presumably of wider experience than the chief clerk who essays to be their monitor. This is done in the name of routine business. Unfortunately no two men often agree upon what constitutes routine business. Almost every railroad officer will tell you that “my chief clerk handles only routine business and never assumes too much authority.” When closely questioned, the same officer will reveal in the utmost confidence the fact that the same condition does not obtain with the chief clerk of the officer who is over the informant. Strangely enough, if the complaining witness is promoted to his boss’s job, the same condition still exists, showing that the system is at fault, rather than its individual members. Worst of all, the chief clerk has to break in all the new bosses and thus has only limited promotion himself.
Major Hine has said that the bigness of things on the Harriman lines, the breadth of the policies of Napoleon Harriman and Von Moltke Julius Kruttschnitt, the vice-president in the change of the operation of that far-reaching group of railroads, strengthened his nerve to advocate radical departure from preconceived notions of railway organization. Hine, at his home in Virginia, had once acted as receiver of a suburban trolley system, where he had introduced a simplified organization. He found, at that time, that the underlying principle of that organization would apply to a thousand times as many men on the great Harriman lines. Incidentally, after the receivership was lifted, the new owners of the property discontinued the organization which Major Hine had created, for they took the ground that no other electric road had such a system, and that therefore there could be nothing in it.
Kruttschnitt decided to let Major Hine begin on the Harriman lines with the reorganization of the divisions. He declined to order any changes, but placed the burden of missionary work and conversions among his subordinates on the shoulders of his special representative. There are not a dozen letters bearing on this subject in Kruttschnitt’s office. The work was done by personal contact, which in two years involved over one hundred thousand miles of travel by Hine. Major Hine states that, notwithstanding the splendid spirit of the officers of the Harriman lines, little would have been accomplished without the tactful support of Kruttschnitt, the man whose supremacy and whose brilliant abilities are unquestioned in the railway world. On the other hand, Kruttschnitt has been heard to say that the credit lies with the enthusiastic younger man whom he attached to his staff.