The railroad can and does do a lot of efficient solicitation through its fixed employees in the field; the opportunities of the station agent in this wise are particularly large. And there is a good deal of real sense in this particular circular. Yet the section-boss seems to regard it as distinctly humorous.
“The big boss sits in his office or in his car,” is his comment, “and I think he forgets sometimes that he was once a section man himself and working fourteen hours a day. The farmer doesn’t have a lot of time for promiscuous conversation, nor do we. We’ll wave the hand all right—but a chat over the fence? Along would come my supervisor and I might have a time of it explaining to him that I was trying to sell two tickets to California for the road. No, sir, we’re not hanging very much over fences and chatting to farmers. Under the very best conditions we work about ten hours a day. And there are times when a sixteen-hour law, even if we had one, wouldn’t be of much account to us.”
“What times?”
“Accidents and storms! When we get a smash-up on this section or on one of my neighbors’ we all turn to and help the wrecking crew. I’ve worked fifty-one hours with no more than a snatch of sleep and without getting out of my clothing—and that was both accident and storm. It’s storm that counts the most. It’s nice and pretty out here today, even if a little warmish. Come round here next February, when the wind begins to whistle and the mercury is trying to hide in the bottom of its little tube, and help me replace rails in a snow-packed track.”
Against conditions such as these the railroad finds no little difficulty in securing good trackmen. The section-boss will tell you how, until about twenty years ago, these were largely Irishmen, with a fair mixture of Germans and Scots—even a few Englishmen. The Italians began coming over in droves a little more than a quarter of a century ago and almost the first men they displaced were the Irish trackmen on our railroads. Perhaps it would be fairer to say they took the jobs which the Irishmen were beginning to scorn. The latter preferred to become contractors, politicians, lawyers. What is the use of driving like a slave all day long, they argued, when you can earn five times as much by using your wits?
Of recent years there have been few Irishmen in track service—an occasional section-boss like the man to whom we have just been talking—and with the exception of Wisconsin and Minnesota, practically none of the men from the north of Europe. Even the better grades of Italians have begun to turn from track work. They, too, make good contractors and politicians and lawyers. In the stead of these have come the men from the south of Italy, Greeks, Slavs, a few Poles, and a few Huns. These seem particularly to lack intelligence. Yet they seemingly are all that the railroad may draw upon for its track maintenance.
These were the conditions that prevailed up to the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Since that time the situation has grown steadily worse. With the tightening of the labor market, with the inadequate rates of pay in both the car and right of way maintenance departments of the railroads, the average railroad manager is hard pressed today to keep his line in order. Sometimes he fails. And a distinct factor in the run-down condition of so many of our second-and third- and fourth-grade railroads is not alone their financial condition, to which we already have referred, but quite as much their utter inability to summon track labor at any price within their possibility. It is rather difficult, to say the least, to get a section foreman at three dollars a day when Henry Ford is paying five dollars as a minimum wage in his Detroit factory and munition manufacturers are even going ahead of this figure. I myself have seen grass growing this last summer in the tracks of some mighty good roads. And weeds between the ties and the rails are all too apt to be the indication of even worse conditions—not quite so perceptible to the eye.
It is this very polyglot nature of the men who work upon the track which has operated against their being brought into a brotherhood—such as those who man the freight and passenger trains. The isolation of the section-bosses and their gangs, as well as the dominance of the padrone system among the Italians until very recently, have been other factors against a stout union of the trackmen. But the mixture of tongues and races has been the chief objection. You do not find Italians or Slavs or Poles or Greeks on the throttle side of the locomotive cab or wearing the conductor’s uniform in passenger service, although you will find them many times in the caboose of the freight and the Negro fireman is rather a knotty problem with the chief of that big brotherhood. In fact, it has been rather a steady boast of the engineers and the conductors that their great organizations are composed of Americans. That fact, of itself, is peculiarly significant.
Yet what are Americans? And how many of those fine fellows who drive locomotives and who captain fancy trains will fail to find some part of their ancestry in Europe, within three or four generations at the longest? We have shown that responsibility is not a matter of color, of race, nor of language. And it is responsibility—responsibility plus energy and ability and honesty—that the railroad seeks to obtain when it goes into the market to purchase labor.