Improbitas—Joseph W. Fifer of Illinois.
Improbity—Edward A. Mosely, Secretary.
Armour—Arrange this with the utmost secrecy.
It is evident that the Armour Car-Lines make a business of arranging secret rebates, evading the law and eluding the Interstate Commission.
There are some 300 private car-lines in the country owning and operating about 130,000 private cars. But the law of concentration is acting on the private cars as well as on the railways, and the private cars are rapidly consolidating in few hands. Speaking of this movement in the refrigerator business, the Interstate Commission says in its Report for 1904, p. 14: “Some years ago there were a number of these private-car companies which provided refrigerator cars for the transportation of fruit under refrigeration. Some of these were the Fruit Growers’ Express, the Kansas City Fruit Express, the Continental Fruit Express, and the Armour Refrigerator lines. These companies were all independent of one another originally, and their cars were used in competition with each other.... At the present day all the above car companies have been absorbed by the Armour Car-Lines Company, which has to-day, in our opinion, a practical monopoly of the movement of fruit in large quantities in most sections of the country. There is the American Transit Refrigerator Company, which operates over the Gould lines, and the Santa Fe Fruit Express, which operates over the Santa Fe System, and there are numerous refrigerator lines, having a small number of cars and engaged in a particular service, but we know of no company other than the Armour Car-Lines which could move the peach crop of Georgia or the fruits of Michigan. And this company, having acquired sufficient strength to do so, has adopted the rule that it will not allow its cars to go on the line of any railroad for the purpose of moving fruit from points of origin on that railroad, unless it be under what is known as an exclusive contract.”
By force of the enormous shipments the Armours control they have compelled railroad after railroad to make the exclusive contracts they desire, fix rates at their dictation, collect exorbitant icing charges, give them an excessive mileage allowance, return their cars empty if they will at high speed instead of detaining them for loading back, etc. And “if any railroad dares to disobey their orders when they impose a requirement it will not get any more of their traffic. The boycott cannot be visited more effectively upon the railways. That is the secret of the whole situation. They are the largest shippers, the most arbitrary, the most remorseless that have ever been known.”[[292]]
Is it any wonder that Mr. E. M. Ferguson, representing a dozen associations of fruit and grocery and produce houses, should tell the Senate Committee that the “situation is tantamount to commercial slavery”? “It must be plain to all that commercial freedom in any line of industry has ceased when a gigantic trust like the Armour interests are permitted, through ownership and operation of private car-lines to absolutely control the common highways in so far as the use of such highways may be required in the transportation of that particular kind of traffic for which their cars are a necessary instrumentality of carriage, thus enabling the Armour interests (who, it will be remembered, are also merchants in the commodities transported in their cars) to completely dominate over all independent dealers to the extent of fixing rates, conditions, and terms under which such independent dealers may use the common highways.”[[293]]
The fate of a man left to the mercy of the Armours and the mild influence of the Sermon on the Mount is similar to the fate of a man without a gun encountering a tiger in the jungles of Africa. Even the Government seems to be unable to compel justice in this case. The big guns of the Federal courts have little or no effect on the packers and the railroads they have benevolently assimilated. They disobey injunctions as freely as they do the principles of Christianity and the dictates of conscience, with the excuse perhaps, as to the last, of lack of acquaintance.
Standard Oil still practically controls the railroads for the most part so far as the transportation of oil is concerned, manipulating rates and service so as to favor its own business and hinder or destroy the business of competitors.
In the recent examination of Standard Oil methods by the State of Missouri, L. C. Lohman, for 30 years an oil dealer at Jefferson City, testified that he had been forced to abandon his dealings with independent oil companies because the Missouri Pacific and Missouri, Kansas, and Texas roads refused to accept oil for shipment to him from these companies.