There were other obstacles and discouragements, almost an infinite array of them, to be surmounted, but this railroad president had steeled his mind to the accomplishment of that terminal. In the making of it he gave his life. When the day came for the drafts upon the railroad’s treasury, mounting higher and higher, he was cheer; when bad news came from the burrowing engineers, he was courage; when timid stockholders and directors began to worry, he was comfort. He gave of his vitality to the organization, to the making of the terminal, until the day came when he gave too much—and his life went out while he was still like a mighty king in battle. He did not live to see the classic lines of the great station building. As he stands in the waiting-room, he stands in bronze. Those bronze eyes are powerless to see the splendid fruition of his endeavors.
That sort of thing—heroic courage and death-bringing devotion to an enterprise—repeats itself now and then among the executives of the railroads. When the panic of 1907 reached high tide, there was a certain railroad president who, like his fellows, viewed it with no little alarm. He had lunched with a big steel man, the kind the newspapers like to call a magnate, and the steel man had scared him. The company for which the former labored was going to close half a dozen of its plants—was going to throw some thousands of poorly provided men out of work.
The railroad president took that bad news back to his comfortable office; at night it travelled with him in his automobile to his big and showy house. It would hit his company hard in its heavy tonnage district, but that was only a single phase of the situation. He thought of things becoming more disjointed when the news became public—before that week had run its course. That night the president made up his mind to take a big step. It was risky business, but he thought it worth the risk.
He sent for the steel man in the morning and asked him what was the best price he could make for his product. The steel man cut his regular profit in half, but the president was not satisfied.
“You’ll have to show me a better margin than that,” he said.
“We’ll eliminate profits,” said the steel man, “and give you the stuff at cost, to save shutting down our plant.”
“Is that the best you can do?” persisted the president.
Before he was done, the steel man had also eliminated depreciation on plants and half a dozen minor expenses. He agreed to deliver at the mere cost of raw material and labor. Then he received an order that would have broken some records in prosperous times. The road was committed to some big building projects and it needed whole trainloads of girders and columns; bridges by the dozen. The railroad president went further, and helped out the steel man’s car-building plant. He ordered 3,000 steel freight cars, and every day he was getting reports from his general manager of a further falling of traffic tides. They had motive-power rusting on sidings, and they were dumping freight cars in the ditches along the right-of-way because they did not have storage-room for them. That took courage of a certain high-grade sort. When those freshly-painted new steel cars began to be delivered in daily batches of sixty, some of his directors asked him where he was going to find room to store them. He did not answer, for he did not know; but in the long run he won out. His company had a new equipment for the returning flood-tide of traffic which had cost it 25 per cent less than that of its competitors. When the time came to build its big improvement it had the steel all stored and ready. The president was able to tell his directors then that he had saved them $1,700,000 on that close bargain that he had driven in panicky times.
Sometimes a little thing makes a railroad president big.